Don't worry about the other races being too easy.  It sounds like you have lots of growing room with your current difficulty.  You should try a game at sucidal just to see how insanely fast the races move out.  The game is very hard to beat on the highest difficulty and the AI *will* kick your butt if you're not managing every resource to the nth degree.

Approval should only be an issue in the early game.  Once you have a few morale resources, you should be able to run taxes at 79% except when cranking up approval to 100% for short periods to quickly build population.  You can also lower taxes just prior to an election then raise them back up after you win.  On the Civ Manager government page, it tells you how many weeks till the next election.  One oddity with the morale ability, it has a cap.  AFAIK, it's the only abilty that is capped in the game.  The cap was added later.  Before the cap, it was possible to get your morale ability high enough to run taxes at 79% and still get 100% approval on most of your planets.

The neutral morale bonus really helps early game, but yea, if you don't research ethics early, that advantage is much less of a help. 

I agree trade is weak economically.  It's best used for diplomatic purposes.  Lining routes with economy bases with trade modules installed helps, but it's still not worth the number of constructors it takes.

Tourism income can be a big help, especially when "should we fully open the tourism market" passes at a UP meeting.  There's also a random event that doubles tourism income, that helps a lot too.

Yea, properly managing the tax slider is key.

There's a noticable difference in the AI with tech trading on and off.  They're stronger with it enabled.  It also makes the game more interesting.

The MCC is a game winner.  Yea, that alone justifies going evil.

Running one farm with more economy buildings versus two farms and several entertainment buildings is like 6 of one, half dozen of the other.  Higher populations make more money, but so do more economy buildings.  However, higher overall population helps score so on higher quality planets, run two farms and a few entertainment buildings.

You can do a lot with the sliders.  Knowing how to use them properly makes more difference than anything else.  It takes a few games, but you pick it up.

I put all my points in economy and morale first as well.  Creativity is a good one.  You can win a tech here and there for free.  It can make a huge difference when you score one that's going to take a number of turns to research.

I always use Federalist, again, economy rules.

Yea, this game is lots of fun, been playing off and on since Dread Lords was first released and I've played both expansions quite a bit as well.

What is MCC?

The economic bonus the MCC provides in DA is intense, but as far as I know, it does not provide an influence bonus as indicated in the building's description.  It was corrected to work as intended in TA and I might go so far as to say it's even more powerful that way.  I believe it has remained uncorrected in DA because everyone got used to it working the way it does there.  Either that or Stardock didn't see a need to fix it.  Though, I haven't played DA for a quite a while so that may not be the case anymore.

It's true that it has remained "broken" in DA.

Any game you run long enough can end end due to planets flipping your way, even without the MCC.  If you can build a re-education center, you can give the planet it's on to one of the races and run the game out until you're ready to finish it.  I don't play Metaverse anymore, but when I did, that's how I'd keep the games going.

Long leases are good early game to get projects, achievments, and trade goods you would otherwise not be able to afford.  You can use long leases on normal stuff with some discretion and I do.  You just have to balance how much you use them with how strong your economy is.  Even if you run up a couple thousand in leases, it's really not that much once you get your economy going.  Usually, the term lengths are much longer than the game and I only pay them off when I need to get my bank under 20k to avoid the corruption and graft penalty.

Mining resources are key.  It can take a numer of games for a new player to realize how powerful they are.  Always get them and add all the mining modules as soon as possible.  Defend them above everything else.

I once got the exact same score on two consecutive games.  It happens when you end up with all the key ratings the same.  It's entirely possible to play two games the exact same way and that's what I did when I got a duplicate score. 

To work the score, build your military early and strong.  You can use starbase arrays toward the end to really hike the military rating.  I like to build gun ships and leave them parked in orbit. Starbase arrarys were always too much work for me and ships in orbit get a rating boost.  Always build the Spin Control Center and park heavily armed ships around it early.

I spent countless hours playing metevarese games and working the score.  It was loads of fun.  I've cleared my characters a few times so you don't see my full history, but I've posted a boatload of games. 

Have fun!

You're welcome. 

I play the Terran tech tree a lot in TA so I usually have the Re-education Center and SCC.  I only played a handful of Meteverse games in TA, but yea, it depends on what tech tree you're playing with.

To grab mining resources, I bribe the other races to go to war with eachother.  They usually go after the mining resources right away so they open up pretty quick.

I pretty much forget what race has what in each tech tree since I play with a mod I did where I reworked all the tech trees.  It makes for a totally different game.  Right now, the mod is posted here;

http://webpages.charter.net/chblock/Marklar.zip

I haven't played through all the changes yet, but I think it's all good.  Give it a try if you want.  I hope to post it in the mods section eventually.