Sooo...where to start.

Pick whatever race you like, set production slider to 100%, lower tax rate until approval is 100%. Research whatever direction you want to go in. Move military slider to zero and research slider to 75. This should put social slider at 25. Rush buy a colony ship. Start building either a factory or a lab. Set survey ship to Auto Survey. With my intial colony ship I dont normally go to the other planet around my homestar. You can grab it later. Go explore another star system. End turn 1.

Go explore with your 2nd colony ship. Readjust tax rate to keep approval at 100%. If you find an anomoly with $$, rush buy another colony ship.

From here you should get a good jump on the computer. Make sure you have tech trading on for a few games. In a pinch you can sell techs to the AI. For the first year or so you will probably run negative cash flow. Thats OK. Anomolies and selling techs will keep you afloat. Slowly adjust your tax rate up, you most likely cant keep 100% approval forever. Research some morale (entertainment) techs. Build some constructors and get a few resources. As a general rule past the "colony stage" I try to keep approval at 75%. Watch the military line graph, when you see the AI jump it means they are building warships. Join the fun at this time. Dont forget to research a little of the soldiering line techs. At the lower difficulties, this REALLY helps as you arent forced to actually defend all your planets. If the AI sneaks a transport by you, you will probably defend the planet just fine if you are better at soldiering. When you get a decent fleet of ships, pick a race you dont have good relations with, or a weak race in general and attack them. See if that helps.

This is just one of a hundred ways you can try to play. Obviosuly there are other victory paths etc. But hopefully this will help you a little in understanding the game so you dont get creamed everytime.

There is also no shame in turning the difficulty down for a while - on the normal level when you're starting up, the AIs have the advantage that they know what they're doing

Could you expound on that thought a little for me. I thought you need farms to get the population up for tax income? The big problem I seem to have is on my starting home planet morale always goes down no matter what I try. On my other colonies they seem to do ok for a lot longer then my actual homeworld.

Thanks for that info. Will try that out. I actually have a pretty decent game going now, though home planet morale is always at 40%, the other planets are in the 80% to 90% range and finally have a fleet and some good tech's, though for my more offensive weapons i've traded with minor races so I can keep researching other items.

They are right on all point, just wanted to point out that the pop cap for your homeworld is 16B (instead of the normal 6B) because of your capital, that is usually the reason of such low morale there... I usually correct this by filling up my transport from that world (if it's not too much out of the way)