I got this game a couple days ago and I've gone through all the campaigns already and tried some different strats.

I realized that this game is about the ECONOMY. I haven't exactly figured out the bonus difference between something which produces 5 Manufacturing Points vs 10% bonus to Manufacturing, but with the economy allocation sliders I think the buildings which produce percentage bonuses work out better in the long run.

Here's my current strategy. I've been playing the Iconians.

1. Set economy to max social with 1% in research.

2. Rely on Creativity to discover the hardest thing you can research which will improve economy / manufacturing. Science is the last choice.

3. Build Basic Replicator for Manufacturing.

4. Turn the first colony's emphasis on military production and spam colony ships.

5. Build Dream Enclaves after Basic Replicators to improve Moral.

6. Build Robotic Farms after two or three Dream Enclaves.

7. Build bigger buildings if you're lucky to have Creativity Kick in and discover better options.

8. After you have half a dozen colonies let Super Breeder kick in. Put 100% into science, but turn spending down to 1% so you are allocating the minimum amount to do research. It may take like 200 weeks to research something, but you're hoping Creativity keeps kicking in. Reduce your tax rate until your population is 100% satisfied.

Watch your population grow 15% a turn. Keep adjusting the tax slider. Your approval goes down with population growth, but hopefully all those Moral booster buildings help out. After a couple turns your population will have gone from under a billion on each planet to over 5 billion or a 1000% increase.

In theory your tax revenue will have increased by 1000% as well.

You can basically produce and research 10x as much stuff now without having to go grab 10x as many planets.

Set your tax slider back down to 45% and continue playing as you wish..

This rush strategy works until you hit the population limits on your planets.

I'm toying around with the idea of building super transports which will just move older populated planets to newer less populated planets before kicking off another growth spurt..