Why do you guys have 1.5M BC/turn of income ? Please explain a bit in more detail for a new one looking to get more knowledgable. You talk about the counter-intuitiveness of things, please make it more explicit.
Getting that kind of level of income is something that occurs late game in gigantic galaxies where you've pretty much conquered the entire galaxy and own all of the resources in the galaxy.
It's very dramatic to speak of weekly incomes in the millions of dollars. However, the point in the game where the game is really won and where income becomes an enabling feature is probably closer to the 100K per week level. At that level you can really start to simply and quickly rebuild your planets as you see fit. From there is where your growth and power in the galaxy really take off.
As I mentioned in the thread you referenced this is really something that requires a certain critical mass of planets. Certainly elements of this can be used in smaller games but realistically there's not that much you can achieve in this regard in galaxies below huge.
In any case the basic gist is that I start out my own colony rush with my planets primarily focused on production. Typically having around 8 to 10 factories per planet with research buildings only on research tiles, even then probably only on the 300% bonus tiles or the rare precursor library tile and with enough economic buildings so that when I flip my planets into production I don't end up in the red.
This is pretty much all the production or research I will build in the game. Every planet I conquer gets immediately rebuilt to all stock markets. Initially, this is done with whatever conventional production is on the planets I conquer. However as time goes on and I begin to accumulate excess income I use it to buy stockmarkets on the most populous planets first. This causes things to snowball and by the time I have an income of 100K or so I can pretty much rebuild the galaxy at will. Also when I say I convert conquered planets to all stockmarkets I mean *all* stockmarkets. I leave no starport, no industry, no research, nothing on the planet but stock markets. I will eventually add probably a single farm but that's pretty much it. If so then I will also have not a single morale building in the galaxy. I research all morale tech and wonders as well as fully mine morale resources but that's it.
Once I have enough conquered planets converted this way and my income is high enough I can go back to my originally colonized planets and do the same thing, however in this case I leave the Starport and simply buy the ships I need (actually buy the hull and then upgrade to the desired ship is cheaper). I often have to eventually rebuild Starports on some of my conquered planets so that I have enough planets to buy ships on to dispose of all my cash. There is the "feature" of graft that occurs if you keep your treasury above 20K that can reduce your income by as much as 40%. The higher your income the more you lose to graft. This can reduce your income substanstially. In fact the biggest problem with this strategy is in being able to spend all your money down to below 20K each and every turn.
If I feel particularly ambitious then I can add a second farm and perhaps 2-3 VRC's per planet but usually this is more trouble than it's worth. Also your goal is to get to 79% taxes without falling below 20% approval on any planet that has reached their desired population (usually 13B) and not less than 41% on any planet that's still growing. There's no real need to hold your approval above 41% unless you can get it to 75% for the 25% growth bonus and it's really not worth it. You will want to go to higher forms of government and you need to pay attention to upcomming elections and push your tax slider down for the turn that elections occur. You can keep track of when elections will be in government & ethics tab under your civ manager screen. You also need to push the tax slider down to go to war but you don't have to leave it there for when you actually hit end turn.
Like any strategy it sounds simple and it is once you've done it a few times, however just starting out it can be tough to replicate any strategy. The devil is in the details and you simply can't explain every little "what if" that comes along.
