I appreciate the time and effort you had to put into that. You've got some interesting ideas as to how to play the Korx as well. Your choice of screenshots and explanations help to make very clear the way you are approaching the game. Ultimately, though, I think the approach you've taken in your model game is a bit unorthodox, and I am not sure if I personally would recommend it to the beginner. I also do not feel that early game strategy would translate well to levels Masochistic and up (particularly at Suicidal I feel this would be asking for trouble).

To quickly summarize for those who may not have read the guide yet (and please correct me if I am mischaracterizing your strategy), in race set up you are taking +50 military production, +4 sensors and +25% creativity with the Federalist party and playing on an Immense map at difficulty Tough. At game start, you take KorxII with your initial colony ship and upgrade your miner to a colony ship if you immediately see a third good planet. If not, you upgrade the miner to a freighter which you send off to explore. In this game you had a 3rd planet visible and took that instead of upgrading to a freighter.

You then build two factories, two morale buildings and a starport on each new planet and two factories, two morale buildings and your economic capital on your home planet, using 100% social spending. Then you build 11 freighters, use them to explore and route them to the nearest minor civilization to establish trade routes. You build 2 more colony ships and colonize 2 good worlds, then put your sliders at 50/50 research/social and build labs on your worlds (this is 36 turns in) then switch to 50/50 research/military production and pursue a diplomatic approach based on researching diplomacy techs, buying the diplomatic translators, getting research treaties with everyone and economic treaties with most while building your military strength, to be followed (at around turn 110) with resuming expansion.

I can see where, as the Korx, this approach would give you a stable early economy through trade, and it's also understandable that you want to play to the Korx's unique strength (trade). Diplomatic superiority and getting treaties from major powers are also worthy goals, and I too feel that a diplomatic approach may be one of the best ways to play the Korx. I can also see where for a beginner it would ease things to build an early military (so that other major races would be unlikely to attack).

I feel that on the whole though too much is sacrificed to achieve these goals. In the early game, to my knowledge, there are 2 basic approaches that have proven successful for a lot of players on higher difficulty levels: All-out colony rush, and a smaller colony rush followed by rapidly researching planetary invasion and conquering the most advantageous available target. Both of these approaches aim to get a lot of planets. More planets equals higher total population, more research and production and higher income. Making due so long with only 5 planets seems suspect at best, since you simply will not have the resources to compete with the AIs on Suicidal (or even Masochistic or Obscene quite possibly) economically or technologically. You'd be left in the dust by empires with 10 to 30 times more planets.

I understand that a hard colony rush can easily lead to an economic crash and that this strategy is designed to shield a beginning player from dealing with that crash. However, a colony rush is necessary to compete on the higher levels, so I think that beginning players should learn methods for managing the post-colony rush economy (which will make for a steeper initial learning curve) since if they do not, it could be very difficult to pick it up later. Examples of how to manage the post colony rush economy include always taking +30 econ in race setup (and to a lesser extent morale and pop growth bonuses), using 1-3 planets as production centers and not building (beyond recruiting centers) on the others (to reduce maitenence and total spending on production), quickly researching survey ships to exploit anomalies until your population grows high enough, making Concepts of Evil an early research priority so that you can build the Mind Control Center for the +100% econ bonus, prioritizing as early research goals technologies that give bonuses to econ, morale and pop growth, keeping taxes low enough to maintain 100% morale (since you get double population growth at 100% morale, and more people mean more taxes), playing as a super-breeder race, and even, for the Korx, trade.

The more adept a player becomes at using these methods of dealing with the economic consequences, the more planets they will be able to claim in the first year without triggering an economic death spiral. More planets mean more of everything else. Your guide doesn't really touch on any of these issues. Even just acknowledging at the start that this strategy is designed to ease economic management for players who are just starting out, but that it is not as effective as more maximalist (though difficult) approaches designed to gain more worlds for experienced players would at least let a new player know that eventually, if they want to improve, they will have to learn more aggressive approaches.

As to more concrete suggestions, I think a summary of what makes the Korx different from other races (+50 to trade, +3 trade routes, start with all the trade technologies and a unique tech that gives an additional +20 trade, stronger starbase defenses, more mining modules for special resources and super trade modules for starbases) would be helpful, as well as perhaps a brief summary of what the strategy you are going to demonstrate aims to accomplish and what it does not.
Overall though, I really do appreciate the effort you have put into this guide, and the way you tried to really make it Korx specific. Thank you for making it.

My pleasure, glad you found it helpful And please feel free to use the quote. I hope you have success trying higher difficulty level games. I've never had a Minor declare war on me before. That, were it not such a frustrating loss, would be rather hilarious. If you are having too much trouble with the drath, you could consider leaving them out of your games. If you want to keep them in for the satisfaction of beating them, you may want to try making sure the Altarians are also in, then in the same turn, persuading one evil race to attack the Altarians and another to attack the Drath. Due to the Super Organizer ability, this will place the Drath in a two front war. I would think then they would turn their instigation efforts towards one of their enemies. You could also establish at least one trade route with the Drath, which would help make them like you more.

Uh, you might try staying at Tough if you want to do a study of the AI's playing style. Normal, due to the intelligence it is given (but not the economics) just simply isn't representative of what the AI is actually capable of.

For instance, on Normal, the AI won't even try to do anything about you spamming influence starbases everywhere to take their planets. As I remember, anyway-I think I had one race (the Drengin, wouldn't you know it) declare war on me some time after that, but they were already at Wary so I'm not sure what triggered that exactly. In any case, it was a long time ago.

But if you want to do it at Normal so as to help people learning up to that difficulty, more power to you.

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Particularly due to your slow playing style in the above game, I would recommend, and I believe others would agree, that you research to Sensors IV and build Eyes of the Universe rather than taking Sensors as a racial ability. Even with faster games, it's still a very good idea to get it as soon as you can afford it.

As a general rule, for a hard colony rush you want to be building a colony ship every turn. For more restrained approach (which is usually used when you've got a definite follow-up in mind I believe), you need one colony ship every two turns. Better players can achieve those benchmarks basically regardless of the starting position they get, but personally I cntrl-n until I get a precursor mine if I'm playing on suicidal. That is even more helpful with the increased upkeep expense for buildings in TA.

Edit: Credit to Mumblefratz for nearly all of the above thoughts on the rate at which you should be getting colony ships out. I got it from an AAR he's doing.