It may be personal taste but in my opinion the game just got better from expansion to expansion. TA just takes the game to the edge, if you want everything GalCiv2 has to offer, buy DA and TA. I can see no reason why one should return to the older games, the new TA Expansion being just a huge tweaked out version of the older versions. TA is just plainly worth every cent of its price, i have never seen a better expansion pack than this for any game i played.

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The speed of your production is of course linked to your budget you spent on this area. In your economy screen you have the three sliders to shift budget between the areas research, military and social. You have to decide what you need most at the moment. At the very beginning it is good to increase military spending relative to others to get colony ships faster. Remind that you also have the general budget slider that dtermines the amount of budget you can access by the three other sliders, you will see your income decrease if you increase total amount of budget. This will speed up all of the three areas, planetary improvement building (social), ship build speed (military) and research. Additionally you can use the focus option on an individual planet to assign budget more precisely, just click on the icon right next to your military, social or research rating on the planets screen.

With these hints there should be no problem to get colony ships out in 5-7 weeks (helping you to get new planets (buildings/income/production/research) etc