Guides or generally good strat thread?

Are there well known guides, or threads, offering just general tips, basic strategies, priorities for goals, and random tidbits?

I have so many questions and there seems to be so many X-factors to everything that it's becoming very difficult to break the threshhold from 'just started playing' to 'i know how the game works, and now i can manipulate it'.

I feel like I'm blindly going on instinct, and not fact or reason when I'm making my choices.

Leave my first expansion planet empty? Or fill it up? Half/half? Just 1 building?

Put my spending to 100%? Crank taxes?

These things are the types of basic questions that are becoming hard to discern when there's so many X-factors, and I feel badly for wanting to post questions constantly.

So, is there a guide or thread somewhere for someone who understands the terminologies, general flow of the game, and needs guidance? I really don't want to post a thread every 15 turns when I realize there's something else I'm unsure of.

And, as in my last thread, thank you in advance. These forums are filled with incredibly helpful people, who know plenty; a fresh change from other game forums filled with finger pointing jocks laughing at what is nothing more than newness.

"Haha, I alpha'd the game and beat everything on hardest difficulty with 99% handicaps, 119 opponents, on a 386/66hz machine while my wife was in labor on my lap. L2P Noob"

.....I hate those people.

P.S. and yeah, I pulled out a 386/66 reference. Old school. Back when VGA graphics were the BOMB and you had to use a bootdisk to run text-based adventure games. Suck on that teenagers. Not long after that, people could be quoted as saying "What's an internet??"