Trade hubs- I know these give me more money, but how? how do i know how much im getting? Is it worth building a hub at every world?
Each Trade platform earns a base amount of credits, plus a bonus for the longest trade route you have.
You can see how much you're earning by mousing over your credit display on the top right of the screen. This will also highlight your longest route on the main map in white.
Every Trade platform earns the same amount (not counting any bonuses from planet specials), so the more you build, the more money you'll earn from them. You can build multiple Trade platforms at each planet for even more cash.
(Note that the 'longest route' is automatically calculated, and is always the longest direct route between two Trade platforms - no detours just to make it longer.)
Refineries- These gather resources from nearby systems' asteroids according to the manual. what if I already own those systems and have extractors on them? are refineries still useful? what do they do, exactly? How many systems does each one cover?
Refineries gather
additional resources (Metal and Crystal) from your Extractors at the same planet, and planets up to 1 (I think) phase jump away.
They only work on Extractors you own, and each Extractor can only 'supply' 3 Refineries at most - if you click on an Extractor you can see how many Refineries it's supplying (you'll need to give it some time to update after building a Refinery, as the cargo ships take a little while to 'find' all the Extractors they can reach).
Because of this, it's not always worth building Refineries at every planet (depending on the layout of your planets and the phase lanes).
You can see how much extra Metal and/or Crystal you're earning from Refineries by mousing over you Metal and/or Crystal display in the top-right of the screen.
Culture- what does culture do? I know you can't capture a system with lots of enemy culture, but are there advantages to having culture in an area other than that? How many jumps is ideal between broadcast centers? Do I want one at each world?
Culture changes a planet's Allegiance.
Friendly Culture acting on a planet will increase its Allegiance to its empire (up to a maximum determined by its distance in phase jumps from the empire's Capital planet), reducing the loss of credits and resources due to low Culture.
Enemy Culture acting on a planet will decrease its Allegiance to its empire, increasing the loss of credits and resources due to low Culture. If Culture reaches 0%, the planet will rebel and go 'neutral' and must be recaptured. If the level of enemy culture at a neutral planet is too high, you can't capture it until you reduce the enemy culture.
You can see more information about a planet's Culture by selecting it, then mousing over the Culture display at the bottom of the screen, just to the left of the 'unit picture' window.
How many Broadcast Centres you want, and where you want them, is very much down to your Culture strategy. At the very least, you'll want a few scattered about to maximise your planet's Alliegance ratings, and thus how much you earn from them. If you decide to use Culture aggressively (something the Advent are very good at), you'll need to build more, as close to enemy worlds as you can.
