I usually start my planet out by turning off the governor and building one thing at a time.
Yeah, i have never used the governors for anything, except automatically queueing up upgrades to existing buildings
That's about all they can do. They can automatically terraform--change yellow, orange and red tiles to useable green ones and automatically upgrade. I uncheck both boxes and make my own choices. The thing that made me start doing that was that it would always automatically upgrade farms, and that can be a very bad thing. Also, you can and probably will get into a rut where you are upgrading all the time instead of making new buildings on your unused tiles. 99% of the time it is better to build on an open tile than upgrade. For example, building one research building may be the equivalent of upgrading five of them.
Most planets get four factories to start out, then a starport, then two each econ and research buildings, then entertainment and farm.
This is what doesnt make much sense to me. Having a starport implies you will build ships, which should mean you focus production on military, which means your research on that planet will get very little. Why then the research labs ?
I'm not sure what you mean by focus production on military. Most planets should have a starport, or else there won't be any outlet for production except to build and upgrade buildings on that planet. For most of the game it will be beneficial to have nearly all your planets producing ships of some sort. If I don't need warships, then I build constructors or whatever else I can use. Later on, good warships take a long time to build, even with good production capability on a planet.
The point is I try to make most planets well rounded and have each building represented on every planet unless there is a reason not to. Research points generated by research buildings go into the general pool for your empire. Having four labs on one planet is equivalent to having two labs on two planets. The same is not true for factory production. Only the planet where the factory is located can use the production points. Nevertheless, nearly every planet needs several factories, or else it will take far too long to build new buildings or upgrades.
A planet by itself doesn't need research buildings, but your empire as a whole does. You can choose to put most of them on a few planets, or have most planets have research buildings represented. For one thing, with the exception of farm bonus tiles, bonus tiles should generally be used to build whatever building type can use the bonus. If your class 6 planet has a research bonus tile, you should use it.
I don't bother with specialization except for capitals,
?
In the GCII vernacular, a specialized planet is generally accepted to mean a planet that has most of its tiles dedicated to one building type. There is one obvious thing that discourages this in GCII--bonus tiles. They should almost always be used for the type of building that can benefit from the bonus, except for farm bonus tiles, which can safely be counted as ordinary tiles. Manufacturing and research capitals should be specialized, because each factory or lab on that planet gets a bonus. Still, a research planet needs factories to build and upgrade its labs in a timely way.
and the econ and political capitals don't need to be specialized
?
I can't explain why your all factory planets are out produced by a planet with only four factories. If your manufacturing capital is on the planet with only four factories that may be why.
Nope, neither of them had any of the capital buildings
Also, planets will suffer a production penalty if you don't have both extreme colonization techs for an extreme environment--aquatic world, toxic world, etc. But if you didn't have the techs it would be hard to build all those factories unless you bought them all.
Neither planet had a terrain penalty
Also, a question i forgot to ask
Does population, under any circumstance, have ANY other function than providing tax ? Ie could you, if it was possible, have 0 population on all your planets and still get the same research output, production etc, than if you had 50 bil people on all of them ?
As others have stated, taxes are the biggest benefit to having a large population and it has nothing to do with production or research. But the population and the taxes they generate are basic to supporting a large empire.