Ok, basically I'd likea critique of my strategy, and maybe some suggestions. I usually play humans/custom, with a bonus for social production, economics and research;

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At the beggining of the game I buy a colony ship and a factory. I set my spending to usually social and military half-and-half, and lower my research. I make my home planet my production planet, and almost build factories exclusively (to churn out colony ships and then constructors)

once my lnd grab is nearly complete, I shift to mainly social production to get some buildings built. apart from my homeworld, I build almost always 2 factories to get buildings done faster, and a mix of research and economic buildings (unless a panet is close to an enemy border/far away from my home planet, then it becomes another factory-dominated world). It's usually around this time my economy plummets, and it's not until my building campaign is complete, along with a few ecomomy starbases that it recovers.

From here, I alsmost always shift everything to research and learn economy techs first. I wait until I see blips on the military graph until I research warfare techs. From then on it's a mixture of balls-out research, social or military prodcution, depending on what needs to be done; if I just learned a new economy/production upgrade, all to social for building upgrades; if starbases or a military force needs to be built, all to military; if nothing else needs to be done, all to research.
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Is this a wise way of giong about things? Is there any way to counteract the economic slump I always feel early in the game? Are there any suggestions?

One last thing that's not strategy related; I was griping about Galciv's combat 'movies' that don't allow any strategic gameplay on another forum. One person responded saying something along the lines of "just turn auto-combat off and fight for yourself" or something odd like that. Is there any truth to that statement/what did he mean?