Yeah I had fun with it last night but I noticed the approval rating dropping on my home planet but not the fringe planet. I found this strange because the home planet was easily the most developed and influential. I tried lowering taxes but it screwed up required funds for researching basic things. The other two alien races were pretty aggressive.
This is due to the home planet's population being so much greater than your colony. As population increases, approval decreases. I deal with this by mainly ensuring that I don't have too much population on any one planet. One other trick you can do there is to ferry population from the main planet to the colony planet using a spare transport or colony ship-this has two benefits in that it reduces the population on the homeworld (increasing approval on the homeworld) and increases the rate of population growth on the colony.
Im pretty sure it'll take me a few more throw-away games before I can deftly manage even a small galaxy map on cakewalk. I keep killing myself in the polls and economically haha.
Here's some early pointers, regardless of race:
1) Always set your flagship to autosurvey at the beginning. Anomalies can bring in good early cash. If the galaxy is big and you have time, think about building a couple of extra survey ships if you have the time.
2) Your initial colony ship is not full starting out. Land it on your homeworld, then relaunch it to full-your first colony will thank you.
3) I don't use my first colony ship on the planet near the homeworld. I generally send it to a nearby star with lots of planets around it and hope for the best.
4) A decent starting approach is to load up your homeworld with manufacturing (putting research on any research bonus tiles and maybe a couple of trade centers to help with income), your nearby world for research (building a research captial there later), and the first PQ6+ world you colonize as an economic shantytown with a factory, a farm, and rest trade centers and maybe an approval building if you absolutely need it.
5) If you go hardcore tech early, don't be afraid to start running silly deficits and sell the tech to everyone. I disable tech trading for that reason-it made the game really easy for my playstyle.
6) If you want the AI to stay out of your face, you need to start putting up a basic military once they start building ships themselves. Having a weak military compared to other races will put you in a world of hurt and at the end of constant bullying and shaking down. I generally start, if I don't want to conquer right off the bat, with small ships, no engines, and lots of guns-I generally research into the second or third tech in a line (usually missles, sometimes beamz) and build some ships to act as garrisons. They also increase your military power, at which point you'll find your diplomatic relations improve quite a bit.
Econ and production is probably the toughest thing for a new player to "get". Here's a few pointers for that:
A) Every base shield/beaker/hammer of ouput you produce costs 1 BC, assuming it is not "bonus" production (research/manufacturing capitals, etc.). The biggest trap you can fall into is building high-tech structures without the econ to support them-a research center that outputs 10 beakers/turn with 2 maintainence doesn't cost 2 BCs/turn more than a basic factory that produces 6 beakers/turn with no maintainence. It costs 6 BCs more-2 for the upkeep, 4 for the extra beakers, assuming your research is at full capacity. Now if you multiply that across seven or eight research buildings, you can see a good economy collapse pretty quickly. Manufacturing buildings work the same.
B) Building a factory doesn't add the listed amount of hammers/shields unless your military and social spending precentages sum to 100% or so. If you have military spending set to 0 or 1%, and social spending set to 50%, and build a new factory, then you'll get half the capacity that is listed. Labs work the same-a Xeno Lab with 50% research produces 4 beakers and has 1 upkeep cost, for a total of 5BCs consumed per turn. A basic lab under the same situation brings in 3 beakers at the cost of 3BCs a turn. So, newer is not always better, especially early on.
C) You can upgrade over any buildings and it drastically reduces the cost of the new buldings. You can build labs over trade centers, factories over labs, etc, without problem. It's a good way to easily repurpose planets as needed.
D) If you set miltary spending = 1% and lock it, it has the result of telling your planets to build improvements first, and if there are no improvements, to build ships. I generally do this and adjust the social and research sliders according to what I want to do.
E) Money comes from population. I find it easiest to manage my economy by just trying to keep all of my planets sort of near the same population size, since it means that approval among them works nearly the same regardless of world. If you want to make money in this game-and with money comes funding for increased production, which is what money is best used for in this game-think decently large population+numerous stackd economy buidings.
Hope that helps!
