Buy and send out colony ships regardless of whether or not you know habitable planets are around, careful with farms since they decrease your approval. Make a nice big planet your econ world, buy a couple factories to give it a head start, a couple farms, some entertanment centers, an econ capital and everything else market centers. Same basic premise for building production worlds (factories in place of market centers, no farms at all and a manu capital instead of an econ) except you may want to throw up some upgraded econ starbases around them to increase their production. Put the tax slider high enough to make approval around 60% and the spending slider as high as you can get it without pushing yourself into debt (don't be afraid to deficit spend though if you got so cash in the bank). At the start of the game I turn my military spending down to almost nothing and buy all my colony ships (also after founding a new colony, buy its first factory if you have the cash and focus it on social spending).

I find that I can out colonize the AI at intelligent and though the AI gets ahead of me in research at the start once my economy revs up I race past them.

Once the AI starts building its miltary start building attack ships, the AI is not so merciful as to let the weak live.

thanks for the advice joe. I'll apply it as best I can to give it shot.

cheat codes are never an option for me.

you want some steps? ok step form. make sure you maxed out ur civ abilities and techs in the civ screen before the game starts. also use the CTRL N button to make a new galaxy right off the start if you find urself in an unlikeable one. when u get to the game colonize first and ask questions later is a good plan. use all ur money right up to 200 bc on colony ships. you also HAVE to pay attention to your domestic stats. at the beginning of the game and as long as you have an imperial govermeant tax your people at about 45 %. and make sure you boost the amount of spending money. its the big bar below the tax bar. move that up until you only have 2 BC a month coming in. i always start off with two or three factories on each planet . remeber u can always build over them. then a farm. then a multimedia center. make sure to capiltalize on anybonuses a planet has. 300% research? your gonna wanna build ur technological capital right there. if theres not a higher one. as for techs. u cant go wrong with morale techs. remeber you can change the output of what money goes where in the domestic screen. and most of all designs your own ships.

Here's my setup/build order to win on painful+ without exploits:

Custom race: Federation with mostly ship speed techs and +economy bonuses, maybe some research and soldiering adds.

Buy research center and colony ship, turn one.

Turn two, buy factory, second colony ship.

Turn three, usually I go for one more colony ship. Let second factory build by itself.

As your colonies land, buy one factory for each one to start them off fast.

These steps will vary depending on the situation, sometimes there is a resource right in my face, and I pop out a constructor to grab it.

I usually try to set up the number of habitable planets to be managable by fooling with the sliders on planet/star counts, so even on a large+ galaxy I only start off with about 4-8 worlds before everything is grabbed and the wars begin.

Reasoning:
This will quickly develop a good number of worlds to full potential. At painful and above, the AI cheats anyway, and you have to be ready very fast with a fleet. If you go nutz with colonies until you run out of cash you will have more colonies (possibly, depending on how you set up galaxy) but they will be much slower to get going without those early factories.

How to survive the first war:
On higher settings, the AI will usually attack you for looking weak (you will have a small fleet, cuz they are cheating). Buy military bases and put them in the center of your colonies to cover as many as you can, about 6 spaces from as many planets as you can. Put a ship defense assist modules on each (any type). Build all your ships with one point of defense (any type). Always fight in range of a military base with +ship defense. When the hordes of ships come, you can destroy them all usually with just 2 or three ships against 10 or 20 enemy, because they can't hit you.

Be careful about buying colony ships early, your home planet has a very low population and those ships take people away. I like to let my home planet build a scout first, dont buy just let it build. By then the population should be up a little and you can buy a colony ship and you can use the scout to find planets so you do not waste time. Research better engines first, and upgrade your ships immediatly. Be careful about the amount of buildings you build early, they cost money to run. So dont build a farm until you need it, if you have a pop of 1 billion and it can grow to 5, you do not need a farm. I build in this order factory, spaceport, lab then if the pop is at 5 billion farm, market, entertianment.
Small planets 6 and under, factory, spaceport, then all the rest factorys. Remember you control taxes, early on crank up the tax until you get a %60 approval rating, remember to watch this and lower taxes as it goes down. Also make sure your production is as high as it will go and leave you in the black. Once everything is running well you should be able to make money with around a %30 tax rate. Important early to not build too many entertianment complexes to make people happy, remember they are pissed at the tax rate, and that will go down as your economy picks up. Rule of thumb for me, for every farm you build you will need a enertaiment building.
Always use the planet bonus, so if you follow my strategy on using only factorys on 6 planets, but that planet has a research bonus, use it. Never use the food bonus on anything less then a 10, unless it is backed up with a entertianment bonus. Never ever under any circumstance use entertainment of food bonus on small planets, they are wasted bonuses. I like to make my large planets jack-of-all-trades early in the game until I have finnished my settler rush, then I will go through and start specializing them. At this point I decide what are my top three planets for production, cash and research. Cash planets should be able to support a huge population 20 billion+ remember you need one entertainment building for every farm, and lots of leftover plots for banks\markets\yada. My main research planet is the one that got the most research bonuses, remember you do not need population for research or production only cash. (I tend to put at least one lab on every planet) . Another thing I forgot is to research sensors early too so you can build survey ships and scoop all those bonuses, I get 2-3 extra survey ships out and its cha-ching cha-ching, always seem to get cash when I need it too.

EDIT also if you are at the top in the most powerful category, everyone tends to suck up with cash and tech. Do not worry about it early, nobody can invade you anyway. I find it funny, every game early on I am busy building up my planets and have no military at all. The drengin see I have none and declare war on me, of course they have none either, so they never attack. I build a bunch of ships quickly become the most powerful civ and the drengin end up giving me a bunch of techs and cash to stop the war that never happened. LOL the drengin decleration of war is my sign its time to switch to military research.

thanks all