It depends on the strat you want to use, and heavily dependant on tech rate speed also. If I have a good research bonus or tech rate is fairly high, you can research the extreme pretty quick and get a colony started there. The problem with that is twofold, though. One, you onlt get half production, and two, to get full production means an even longer research on the advanced tech. A benefit of this approach is that later ( if you have tech trading on ), the AI will pay some nice BC for the techs, even when there arent any left to be colonized, just be sure they wont invade one of yours!

Lately, though, I have started to ignore them all together. You get a massive leg up tech-wise when you spend those 20-30 turns researching other branches, like econ/production/weapons. Let the AI colonize them for you while they lose money for the first few months owning it, then research the tech later when your lab skills are higher, it might only take you 2 or 3 turns, invade them, and you have a partially built planet that might be a boost to your econ. right off the bat.

Of course if you are being diplomatic or dont want to invade that race, then that strat doesnt work too well   

Two more questions about that topic.

a ) Does the advanced extreme colonization tech enable more tiles on that planet or is it just that the production penalties go away ?

b ) If it enables more tiles, does it make any difference in regards to how many tiles with bonusses I will find whether I have the advanced level right when settling the planet, or is it enough to research it later ?

 

And another related question:

c ) With Orbital Terraformers, can the additional tiles I get from that have any bonusses, since they are available right from the start ?

I am playing Dark Avatar, btw.

The advanced tech does not open new tiles, just removes the penalty. Keep in mind that the penalty does NOT affect research production, morale, population, or anything else on the planet, just social and military production. You can often buy/influence/invade planets from the AI that you don't even have the basic tech for and still make it a reasonable research/econ planet by rush-buying and focus building.

For terraforming, no. All three levels of terraformed spaces are incapable of having tile bonuses, regardless of when or how they are improved.

to be perfectly honest I don't worry too much about them at the beginning. Because a lot of my stratagy revolves around building a strong economy and earning big dollars for the war budget i find that keeping a colony ship near them, researching the technology, then selling it on whilst there are still avaliable planets can get you a good 5000 at least from every race (depending on how many worlds to have reseacrhed and are guarding.

once you sold on the technology you can then colonize the worlds you are guarding thus downing the value of the Technology as the palnet type becomes more scares. So in the end, you gain more planets and money for selling off a now useless (or close too) technology.

Key hint* say all barren worlds are colonized, your trying to sell Advance barren world colonization to a race who owns no barren worlds, they will offer you 0 credit for it because the technology is worthless to them. the only reason the technology is useful is because it will give you more planets. otherwise forget it, this technology has only a breif moment when it is litterally golden. any earlier than that time and it's useless, any latter and it's useless. Have a plan in place on how you are going to use this.

I use it to scam AI's for extra money and gain more planets which extend my empire at the same time.