1) Keep your populations low (13 or under) while building initial (that is, filling all tiles up through Habitat Improvement), except the home world, and maybe a world with a mystic spring.

2) Never build a world over 20 pop until you are pretty expert at the game. (Even then it is probably counter productive unless it has a couple of mystic springs and you mine several morale resources.)

3) Except for 1-2 producer planets, to start build every tile you can in money enhancers. As you balance things later you can over build with other stuff bit by bit.

4) Don't over load your home world with producer buildings at the beginning. Keep it simple; 2-4 (5 max) porducers (labs or factories, slightly more if you use a blend, less if you have the right bonus tiles), everything else money. Remember to keep the pop low - don't waste early tiles on farms and happy stuff.

5) Build only the most important bonus buildings for your strategy - otherwise don't irrevocably commit the tiles. Try to build only 1-2 unique buildings on any one planet. Avoid any but the buildings MOST directly beneficial to your strategy on the home world (example: Lab strategy home world gets Research Coordination, Tech capital, Omega research ONLY; maybe a Counter Intel later if needed to beat the spy war).

6) When in doubt, build more money makers.

7) Build freighters and Trade, Trade, Trade. Favor distant minors, but having one trade route with each potential opponent can help stave off early hostilities. If you do have several trade routes with a distant minor, make them great deals on whatever techs they have in trade for you best defensive and economic stuff; maybe even give them defensive stuff. You want them to survive and preserve your trade routes.

8) In Mid-game build the galactic privateer to protect your trade routes.

9) Build some econ starbases w/i range of your home world along the trade routes, but initally only build the trade enhancers. you can add Production/research enhancers later when the economy has an excess.

10) Round off any tech trades with cash from the trading partner.

11) Get sensors early, then build about 2 more survey ships; upgrade them to ion engines as soon as you can. They will more than pay for themselves even if anomalies are set to rare.

12) Despite conventional wisdom in these forums I rarely see the need for accelerated growth in the early turns. Consider adjusting your taxes every turn to keep your least happy planet at 41-42% approval. Just enough to grow normally, much better for taxes. Stretch that initial nest egg.

13) After early planets are grown out (remember, only 13-16 pop early on), set taxes to maintain only about 31-32% approval.

14) after Republic, set the taxes for higher approval (55%+) only just before elections (check the Civ Manager screens for next election date).

Note: all guidelines have exceptions, but by the time you're beginning to recognize them, you'll be able to write your own guidelines.

drrider

This isn't the order I build, just the balance I have in the end.

I build one counter-espionage on each world (remember, it provides 20% morale, which is decent). Then, I build two farms AND two morale centers. This brings population up to just under 20 billion (with all the farm upgrades). Building a third farm will radically skew the planet balance, you need like 5 additional morale centers once you build that third farm, so only do it for huge planets, they will be your fat cash cows. Take note of tile bonuses and the planet itself, if you conquer a minor civ for instance, their planet can hold a very large population without any improvements, so consider it like they have a farm built in. Also, if there are tile bonuses, use them. A morale center built on a bonus counts as two morale centers, and a farm counts as two on the weak bonus, and THREE on the large bonus. Emphasis on the THREE because that would essentially be building THREE farms so you will need like 8 morale centers for that. But after you have got your farms and morale centers all balanced, build banks (I usually have 2), and I build an embassy (influence gets you cash too). Also, try to get the morale trade goods (there's 3 I think) and any morale resource starbases. They will help a lot. You may struggle a little in the early game, but in the long run I always have 90+ approval, and thousands of bc's flow in weekly while still at full spending capacity.

Here's a quick question: Do larger or faster freighters yield more money?

(Sigh...) no.

but they should, I think you should be able to put more than one trade module on a freighter, each one will increase the value of the trade route set up by that freighter.