Some of these will seem too basic, but the forums run extremely slow for me and searching them has proved too frustrating. I played Galciv 1, and some of these are leftover issues I had with that. Anyway, here they are:

1. Farming Population Cap Increases

I assume that everywhere in the manual and game where it says farming will increase the pop max cap by millions, it really means billions. I wasn't building any farming at all for the longest time thinking that the increase in pop would be something like 3 million for a basic farm, when it fact, it seems its more like 3 billion. This certainly has ruined my current game, but live and learn.

2. Unspent Resources

Let's say I have a planet that has 3 military production points, 3 social production points and 3 research points. I opt not to build a ship. Does that mean I now have 4.5 social and 4.5 research? Or does it mean that I'm essentially just wasting my ship building points (with the only benefit being the saved BC not allocated to ship construction). I'm assuming the latter. And yes, I realize this is an oversimplified example since your production points are heavily effected by what facilities and planetary bonuses exist. I'm just trying to grasp the basic concept.

3. Industrial Capacity

On the budget menu, what are most players using as their industrial capacity? It starts at 50% and I rarely have ever moved it. Should I be setting it at 100% and adjusting taxes to compensate? Leaving it around 50%? What is the "Default" capacity I should be using to function effectively. The AI at normal seems to be outbuilding me consistently and I can't figure out why (beyond the fact that most of my planets had a 5 billion population cap).

4. Pop Growth

Does it really grow at the rate of 200,000 at 99% approval and 400,000 at 100% That seems like a very strange, arbitrary line.

5. Why does the AI grab starbases that are nowhere near any of their systems or trade routes?

Do some starbases provide an empire-wide bonus v. an area of effect bonus? The military resource seems to provide an empire wide bonus, but do any others? I've never quite understood the usefulness of starbases off in some dead area of the map where no one is located, but the AI loves them. And that brings me to my final question . . .

6. Why do so many maps contain vast dead patches of space?

This is a problem from Galciv 1, but it seems that something like 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 of Huge and Gigantic Galactic maps (set to tight cluster distribution and abundant stars) will contain an enormous patch of dead space where nothing is located. I can't count how many times I've restarted because my homeworld is located in some corner of the map with three systems or less and I'm about 4-5 totally blank sectors from the nearest system. This isn't really a question since the answer isn't likely to help (you just restart those games), but I'm curious as to why the map generator creates so much dead space rather than making an effort to at least somewhat evenly distribute the tight cluster of systems. I've yet to have a game where at least one race wasn't totally eliminated from contention by their map placement.