You need to balance your economy, production, and research.

From your post you are focused on production and research, but are ignoring the economy. This is why you go broke so fast and the game seems to come to a screeching halt.

Here are some tips--this build pattern is fairly reliable, but there are be better ones out there once you gain more experience. This gives a balanced planet, and assumes a PQ10+ planet:
1. Upon initial colonization, build 2 factories.
2. Build spaceport.
3. Build 3 economic buildings.
4. Build morale building.
5. Build 2 research buildings.
6. Continue building to support your specialization and goals (i.e., production powerhouse, research powerhouse, economic powerhouse).

Your spaceport can curn out ships at your pleasure (colonies, constructors, warships, etc).

You need to set your tax rate to balance out your morale. Keeping morale high gives you population growth bonuses. So don't tax your loyal subjects to death and revolt.

I suggest you don't buy buildings except for the initial factory on your home world. You will need your initial BCs to counter your deficit spending for the first 20-50 turns. Once you gain more experience with the game, you can tailor this advice as well.

Don't forget entertainment needs, and try your production rate at 100 only when all of your planets are built up economically. Trading with other races can sometimes be essential, and try to keep your millitary spending down a bit unless your at war{with the Yor or anyone else with usually big armadas}. For planetary approval reasons, you may also want to refrain from building farms until your approval is good & your population cap is reached.

Just try multiple different strategies until you find one that works for you.

Try lowering your difficulty level until you get the hang of things.

A problem with buying out structures is that they have maint costs AND your production/research costs you BC, so it's a double whammy. The maint cost of a building is small compared to how much you pay for the production/research the structure produces. Simplified example, say you have a factory that produces 6 manufacturing points. It'd cost you 6bc out of your global budget to produce that 6mp + the maint cost of the factory. (There are a lot of other factors.) So by not letting your pop grow and by buying out structures, you're radically tilting your econ towards paying and not gaining.

I also don't think there's much point in jacking your research super early, because you can only build so much. You need to expand and increase your overall empire-wide production (and econ, obviously) before you can really use new tech. Focusing so much on tech immediately is probably also slowing down your colony rush (unless you buyout colony ships, which will destroy your econ quickly).

+econ structures multiply the money your colony generates, and there are a variety of factors, but the biggest one is tax from population. So a bunch of +econ structures or bonues aren't helping much if you have no people.

Setting industrial capacity to 100% is good - I think most people try to keep it at 100% at all times, which demands a solid economy.

Set your taxes as high as you can in the beginning, but low enough to keep approval at or above 50% - or higher if you want faster growth.

Amount of population also impacts population growth. Many recommend (as do I) that you "land" your first colony ship and relaunch it at max capacity, and then always launch colony ships at max capacity, so that newly colonized worlds start with a decent sized population to get decent early growth. Your homeworld starts with a good sized population and will remain stable even while cranking out colony ships, as long as you're not buying them out every turn. Usually you end up having to let them build a bit, so population recovers.

I personally start with my sliders at 60/20/20 (I'm sure everyone has their own style, and go even more extreme in some cases). The only developed world you'll have at the start is your homeworld, and the main focus early is colony/resource rush, so you want to be able to crank out ships. Once you're a bit more established you can balance your sliders to switch to emphasize research (and social) and catch up for tech. I like 60/20/20 as I don't want to complete stagnate structure building or research, but I do want to focus on military to crank out ships (which I often buyout after they've been building for a few weeks and are less costly to buyout - IF I have extra BC coming in via anomolies.)

At the very start you won't have many research generating structures, so there's little point to focusing the sliders on tech. After you build labs in a few places and then focus on tech, you'll gain way more than you lose by ignoring tech early.

The first techs you research can be critical. You might want to read up on researching "sensors" a.s.a.p. (to get survey modules). In short, it's a great way to vastly supplement/grow your early treasury and allow yourself to buyout ships and structures. You basically build extra survey ships, so you can grab more anomolies, which increases your chances at the +250/500/1000 anomolies (and all kinds of other bonuses and goodies, even partial research), which is huge early. As the Yor (who also start with better drives so you can do all of this FASTER), even with the tech slider at 20 early, it only takes me about 15 weeks to research sensors - time to build and deploy a few colonizers and build up my production to be ready to blitz out a few survey ships. It's yummy (if not semi-exploitive since the AIs don't do it...but it's so hard to not do it!)

Well, the trick really is to balance a lot of things. Here are some very basic tips that might help you...

Assuming you are starting a game on a medium map, there are, I think, four things that is helpful to focus on in the first year:

Early game economy: Early in the game (the first year, as you mentioned) is the most important time to build an economy, or figure out some way to make money. Here are a few simple strategies:
- Take the Super Trader Ability. Not only does this let you start building freighters right away, it also lets you build an econ capital from day one. Building your economy capital on a world with 15-18 billion people will help.
- Take the Super Breeder Ability. If you are colonizing a lot of worlds, this can really help. It only kicks in when you have 100% approval, so watch those sliders. This is a good way to get lots of people in the first 3-4 months, which will help set up your empire for the rest of the game.
- Spend your bonus points on the three economy helping stats. With 10 points you can pick the +30% economy, +10% morale, and +40% population growth abilities. If you have a custom race, that still leaves you with 5 points to customize your race (I personally pick up +1 speed, or go to +20% morale and pick up +10% planet quality). If you don't have a custom race, those basic ten points will add on to whatever bonuses your race already gets, so you should be fine.
- Set anomolies to "abundant" in the map setting. Early on research sensors (and to a lesser degree impulse drive). For medium maps build 2-3 more survery ships in the first month and set all of your survey ships to "auto-survey". Anamolies can give a variety of boosts, but the instant cash ones (+100,+250,+500 and +1000 in DA) are the ones that will help your early cash reserves.
- Don't spend all of your initial 5000 credits on rush buying things. Instead, drop your taxes so that your people are at 100% approval so that they breed faster. Keep some money around so that you can handle 100% production while you "buy" approval. When your colonies get within about 2-3 billion of their max, or when you run out of money, then raise your taxes up to a higher rate (as needed).

Research early game:
Unless there is a world you absolutely must have, the colonization techs are generally a waste of time. Some people disagree, and it does depend on how many of any type of environment spawns on your map. There are a lot of directions to send your research, but it can help to try and catagorize techs into three catagories:
1) Techs that increase your money
2) Techs that spend your money
3) Techs that help your military
Catagory 1 includes techs like econ buildings, morale buildings, better governments, trade, diplomacy and influence. Until your empire is generating a profit, it is good to focus on these techs early.
Catagory 2 includes techs like research centers, manufacturing buildings, anti-matter power plants and the like. These "infrastructure" techs are going to be very important for you to have as you enter the middle game, and prepare for war. But realize that each one you research will increase your costs - in the cost to upgrade, needing to spend bc on the increased production provided, as well as basic maintenance costs. One strategy is to alternate going up the Catagory 1 and Catagory 2 branches. Build econ enhancing techs, then when you are generating a surplus, go up the next infrastructure tech that you can afford, then build some more econ techs, repeat. You will have to adjust this based on your specific game conditions.
Catagory 3 techs are things like weapons, defenses, soldiering techs, starbase enhancements, hull advancement and logistics. These techs are vital when you actually want to fight war. However, you don't need them early. I wait to start on these until I have a firm range of catagory one and two techs already researched. At some point your galaxy will start to militarize. Keep pace with the other civs and only pick up these techs as needed in the first year. Keep a check on the Military graph to see which empires have built attack ships, and how strong they are. Even if you really like war, generally you want to wait until quite late to start researching these.

Colonization Early Game: Well, on a medium map a few extra worlds can really swing the balance, so you don't want to be out-colonized either. Still, at a little over 1000bc to rush buy each colony ship - that is probably not a good way to spend that precious starting 5000. If you start off by building survey ships you should get a good picture of your immediate surroundings in the first few weeks. It is probably better to rush buy 1-3 factories on your starting world, and just focus a lot of your production on "military" to quickly build colony ships. Try not to build too many, you want to get back to researching as soon as possible.
In star systems with damaged and undamaged worlds, go for the undamaged worlds. You can probably get away with completely ignoring the extreme colonization tech until you start invading those worlds. Go for the PQ 10+ worlds first, they give you a morale boost. Go for the PQ 1-4 worlds next, they will be some of the best worlds in the long run. Pick up the PQ 5-9 worlds last.
If you colonize a lot of worlds, spending money on all of them might be more than your early economy can handle. That is OK. Just let some of your colonies sit there and breed until you can afford to spend credits on production. For instance, on some worlds you might only build a morale building, or a morale and farm building using the basic colony production pts, don't even worry about building factories - just focus production on social for those worlds. You can always build over these tiles later when you want to develop the world. You just want a little morale boost to help you keep the people at 100% approval so that they breed and start to pay taxes. Trying to build up 8 industrial worlds simultaneously can be a good way to crash a young economy, even with (or because of) the Super Hive Ability.
The key in the colonization phase is to grab good long term planets so that the other races don't get them. They don't need to be developed right away. The extreme colonization worlds usually don't need to be a part of this strategy. Remember, if you and several other empires share worlds in the same star system, a higher population and approval will help you in culture flipping their worlds to you as well.
Finally, you probably want to design your own colony ships. I like to put a pair of ion drives on mine in place of the hyperdrive, but it depends on how far they need to go how fast. You have to buy those bigger engines with precious early game resources, so only build more expensive colony ships when the speed boost is actually needed.

Your homeworld early game: There are a lot of ways a homeworld can go, and you probably want to use any bonus tiles that appear (except the +300% food tile). However, assuming the most common startup, you will have one PQ10 world with a 12 billion population cap. The best way I have found to use this world is to make it your early manufacturing and economy capital. Specifically, I like to develop it with 1 morale building, one food building, the econ capital, the manufacturing capital, and 5 factories. Here is why I like to do this:
- The manufacturing capital now only gives a +33% production boost, and this effect can be duplicated later on more appropriate worlds using Quantum Power Plants. But manufacturing capitals now also give a +10% econ boost, so you want them on a planet with a high population to maximize the new values. Your home planet will have a population in the 15-19 billion range for most of the game.
- The high starting population and high population cap for the homeworld makes it a good place to put the economy capital. You want to build that early because it is fairly cheap to build, and typically it is early on when you are having the most trouble with money. With the new morale rules, you probably are not going to have some super 40billion population world ever, so it is a safe bet that your homeworld will have as healthy a population as any other world in your empire.
- Early on you want that 100% approval so your people breed. You also want a lot more people. Building the morale building helps you keep a higher tax rate while still keeping approval at 100% on your homeworld, which because of the large starting population is often the hardest place to handle morale early.
- You want to build one, and only one, farm building here right away. This will change your pop cap from 12 to 15. Later farming upgrades will take you to 17 and 20. The key is that they changed how morale works so that populations over 18 billion take a huge morale hit. If you know you will eventually research intensive farming, you only want one building here. Alternatively, if your home world starts with a +100% food tile, build basic farming on it, but remember to never research a higher level of food. This will start out your homeworlds population cap at the optimal 18 billion.
- You want factories early. You want them to build early survey ships, colony ships and constuctors to grab resources from your enemies. If you are already making this world your manufacturing capital, you will want as many factories here anyway.
- remember, except for the capitals you can always change what this world does later by upgrading existing buildings with new ones. Sometimes I will later switch my homeworld over into a pure research world (and while I may lose the 33% production of the manufacturing capital, I still retain the +10% economy on my high population). Don't be afraid to be flexible.

This strategy will leave you lagging in research behind the AI for the first two months or so. I usually make the first decent PQ world I colonize into my research center, because I know I will need to catch up eventually. Of course, adjust your strategy based on bonus tiles, galaxy composition, quality and distance of new worlds found, and your specific needs at any point.

There are, of course other strategies for other situations. Hopefully that gives you a good feel of a way to approach the first 50 turns or so (1 year) on a medium sized map with about a half dozen enemies. Hope that helps. Or at the very least it shouldn't hurt

Well, tonight/last night (Who knows? How long have I been here? What's that awful pain in my stomach?!) I played the longest game I have yet to play, thus far. I had to quit, though, because I had to go somewhere. But there's a few things I noticed...

I played as Altarians with 60% Economics, 40% Research (+20% from Technologists, 60%), 40% Morale. On a huge map with 5 random opponents with random intelligence. Abundant stars, planets, habitable planets, anomalies, astroid fields, normal technology, random number of lesser races. Getting planets with 19 quality was common. Lots of space, etc.

Anyway, what I noticed was...

Population grows a little better with 100% approval, but not much, really.

Nobody likes it when taxes are above 49%, no matter what.

It doesn't seem to matter how many people are on your planet, it doesn't affect beakers, hammers or shields, only factories/labs do. They're only good for tax revenue? Dumb little bastards...

This game has an enormous amount of overwhelming micro-managment.

No matter what I do I'm screwed.

So... I did okay. I had seven or eight planets, but they were *always* building/upgrading crap. Which drains your coffers, too. Seems they're all better just sitting there paying taxes, god forbid you ever want to improve the dump. But if you don't build anything, nothing ever improves, yet it takes a million years and so you are always broke. Lose-lose situation. *shrug*

I don't know how to use star-ports/starbases or whatever the hell they are, I just put them on those polygons if I see them, otherwise what do I do with 'em?

Auto-pilot seems broken. When I click on a planet many tiles away, the ship won't automatically go there. It just sits there with a trail in front of it. What the hell? Opening the ship/planet panel up and clicking on the ships icon makes it move, though.

I still didn't have a military. The Drengin came along and told me I make them laugh, pay me or die. So I paid them. Wasn't much, though.

I don't know diplomacy. I turn Tech trading off, but what's these treaties all about?

*sigh*

First, the Starport is needed to construct ships. Strategies vary, but I put them on every single planet I have except the very smallest. Why? Because I hate to not be able to build a defender, or perhaps a transport, constructor, scout, or survey ship. Every planet needs to help in propagating my empire, and space power is a key to this.

The guidance states that population growth at `100% morale is 2x normal, so this will really count up over the long term – even if on the short term you don’t see much difference. If you’re shooting for income then you’ll want to find a higher PQ planet, get 3 or 4 factories for basic building, build a starport, and then LOTS of economic structures (markets and such). Then build a morale enhancement with a farm (usually 1 for 1), and shoot for a population of at least 12B. One of these will really get an early economy going. I will occasionally Focus my social building to make sure the markets (which are very cheap to build, and have no maintenance cost) are constructed quickly.

For population, I’ve noticed the AI goes for a fairly heavy tax rate and, as a result of my 100% morale, I have a much higher population than the AI – even if I have fewer planets. This means my economy is bigger. Eventually more population growth isn’t as important as you get near your population caps for your planets. Then crank up the taxes, although I always keep taxes such that morale is 60% or better, or 70 to 80% if I’m running an advanced government.

As to the nasty Drengin, one of the keys to having the AI leave you alone is to get a few defenders up fairly early. This means a detour into military techs, but you need to. Early all you need is one or two defenders and your military standing will increase nicely. In general I try to make sure my military rating is at least 100 (e.g. – average). A tiny or small hull works perfectly fine – ignore engines just place a few weapons on it and off you go. For instance, I generally research to Laser 2 so I can get at least an attack rating of 2 or 3 on my early ships. Your military rating is based on HPs+offense+defense/10, and then summed for all your ships. This score is then rated against the AI, which gives you your military rating. If you do get a decent defensive military up you’ll notice a few things: the AI leaves you alone (no threats – a key indicator your military needs help ASAP), and the AI’s view of you in general will increase. But, you need starports to build any ship (the build screen is in the upper right of the planet screen).

You are correct the population only affects taxes, and even then there is a diminishing return. High population planets become very hard to keep happy, so I generally limit my planets to 12B or perhaps 18B.

You only have 1 economic and 1 research treaty to give. If you give to an AI then that means you are giving them 10% of your economic output. This does not come out of your economy, mind you – it is like a free gift. Likewise for research. If the AI gives you one then you get 10% of their economy or research. I’ve found that the AI is reluctant to exchange treaties (I NEVER just give them away) unless you have good relations and a pretty good diplomatic skill. Always try for an AI that has a good economy or research rating since, obviously, you want 10% of a bigger number. But, don’t dawdle asking to exchange treaties, otherwise the AIs will trade with each other and you’ll be shut out, or forced to exchange treaties with a very small power.

I’m not sure I can help you with moving ships. I’ve never had the problem you describe. Are you sure the ship-in-question is highlighted when you select it to move to a location?

Hydro

Whenever Mr. Wardell talks about trying to appease both the hardened veterans of TBS games and newcomes, I kind of shake my head. Surely these things are easy to figure out for everyone? I guess having historically played an unhealthy amount of these games does make things a lot more transparent.

I do remember one old-time gamer writing something like: "Tens of thousands of hours of playing games and the mostly what I've learned is how to play new games without reading the manual."

I think that some people have either an insight or they spend too much time playing or they plough through the code and get a devs insight into the game,
Well thats my excuse for being as lesser mortal

I'm quite new to the game (1 week) and played 2-3 normal games which I won easily, so I'm going up with the difficulty slowly to see how the AI develops.

My strategy which seems to work well at least up to "challenging" (or whatever the difficulty above normal is called in english):

At the start I cheat a little, I admit that. I start the game until I get a 300% production bonus tile on my homeworld and I have some stars in the neighbouring sectors.

I then buy the first factory on the production-bonus-tile

Then I go to the shipyard and make my colony ships as fast as possible. (faster propulsion is also the first technique I'm developing) and buy 2-3 during the next few turns. for the first turn I put research spending to 100%, since I buy everything anyway.

I have 3 priorities during the start of the game:
1) colony rush
2) as much research as possible (first some propulsion, then sensors, then communication)
3) a handful of explore-ships (hence sensors) to grab those anomalies

I will run quite a huge deficit for a long time, and I balance that out by selling technology.
I try to trade tech for tech and mainly tech for money.
If I can sell a technique to all opponents that's the best that can happen.

For this I need of course a serious technological edge and diplomacy mods help a lot.

When trading tech I try to sell them everything that is "outdated" for me. Yes I also sell them weapons. (LIke Laser1 when I'm at Laser4 or so). also I sell them 1 certain defense technology up to the most current research - and then I wont use those weapon types (so far I always sold them rocket defense and then didnt use rockets). and -if possible- I try to sell a technology every of the oppononents still needs - which maximises my profit. also some "uncritical" developments I sell early to get a maximal profit from it.

I also try to grab new tech from them, but hardly ever try to buy weapon techs from them, because they price that too high. and I never ever sell them technology for diplomacy-increase.

Up to the current level that works nicely and I make insane profits from it while still keeping up a sufficient technology edge. I then use the profits to expand faster, to explore more anomalies, to build constructors, to build up worlds fast at a deficit and to resarch heavily.

I guess that will not be possible anymore in the higher levels, but I will see about that when I get to there. At least it works great for me up to the current level, even to an extend that trivialzes it.

Some ways to get money:

- Set taxes so low, initially, that you maintain 100% approval. Your population will build twice as fast (even more if you have super breeder.)

- Work on the bio tree to get bonuses to pop growth.

- Work on achieving a government quickly for the economic bonuses (of course even more than normal if you choose the economic party.)

- Make sure you're surveying a lot. This can be a lot of initial cash.

- Always keep an eye out for not only economic resources to put starbases on, but morale ones too. The higher your morale, the more you can tax.

- Personally, I almost always burn the points to have the highest morale option when I customize my race of choice. Sometimes I take high pop growth too, but I consider the morale option crucial.

- Build trade routes asap because they gain you more cash the longer you have them and they help you avoid war. After a while, they can be very profitable.

- There's also tourism money by having great influence, but my experience is that this is only a small portion of the available cash out there.

- I personally delay building morale structures for a while until I am close to actually -needing- them, to avoid maintenance costs.

I used to run into economy problems way back when I first started playing, but quickly figured out some things I was doing wrong. First is just to build freighters and get trade routes going. You can bring in a ton of BC doing this. Then if you build trade starbases in a sector where several freighters pass through, usually your homeworld, then you can really rake in the BC. So if you do this, alot of your economy problems will just go away. All it takes is a few techs and just one race to start setting up trade routes. You can even send all of your freighters on the same exact route and they will make you some BC, turn after turn. Keep this up and you will have a positive BC flowing. Oh and I have had times when I was able to set a 100% tax rate and still get an approval of over 70%. So that tax rate along with all my freighters and I was once rich galactic ruler.