money= tot of hammers+shields+research points?

No. Your money comes from your population (how much is controlled by your tax rate), from trading with other Civilizations, from tourism, and (potentially) from extorting the AI players. In other words, your cash inflow has nothing to do with production or research.

Your cash outflow (ie, spending), on the other hand, is where production and research get involved. Every factory, research lab, etc. that you build represnts industrial or research capacity - by themselves, not actual production. Your spend rate determines how much of this capacity gets used. If you've built sufficient labs for 10 flasks of research per turn, for instance, and set your spend rate to 50%, then you will generate 5 flasks of research per turn.

Note that this is not tied to your cash inflow - in other words, you can run a deficit by setting your spend rate to use more capacity than you have income to pay for.

- Ash

thank you it's very clear now. considering that u have no planetary slider for your production it isn't advisable to concentrate one planet on one field. for example if i have a planet with 12 pq it's better to build 5 manufacturing center, 4 research labs and 3 market center instead of building 12 research center because if u can only set overall production the specialization of a planet in a field could cost u a lot of production points.

I have yet to play the game (wasn't in the beta), but from what I've heard posted, it actually is advisable to specialize your planets. Without playing the game, I can't offer much more by way of explanation of why this is the case.

While there is no "slider" to control spending on a planetary level, you can focus production in a particular area by clicking on the appropriate header at the top of the Colony Management screen. As I understand it, this converts some the planet's capacity in the other areas into additional capacity in the desired area, although not at a 1:1 ratio (ie, there is "lost" capacity in the conversion).

- Ash

I tend to disagree. Specialization works for me. It's harder on small-tiny maps since once in a while you may be stuck with your starter planets. But, having several planets focus on military I can crank out ships. My research bases are busy making RP all the time. Only have somebody focus on social to speed up upgrades or initial builds..
To each their own.

That is the beauty of the system. Specialization is great, but without the people (pop) to "run" the facilities, it doesn't matter if you have a gazillion factories to produce that wonderful armada. You need farms to drive everything, as farms equal people, and people equal money.

Flipping the coin however, too many people means overpopulation, which will bring down morale, which can, and certainly will, lead to people not working. This will cut into your production. So, you end up spending more money on social buildings to keep up morale, and/or spending valuable tech upgrades toward it, or spending actual cash to appease the people, or the ever dreaded "lower that tax rate", which in turn defeats the whole purpose of that high population in the first place. Lots of check and balances on running the economy in GalCiv2, which is why it is such a killer strategy game.

Yup, definitely better to balance out your population across all planets rather than trying to maintain a few "farmbasket" planets, though the latter strategy was more viable in gamma than it was during beta.

On the other hand, approval is easy enough to control that I drop a farm on just about any planet large enough to use one.