Colony expansion strategies

There are several posts laying about that delve deeply into this topic. Do a little poking around.

If that doesn't help, post some more data about your game style (difficulty, size, races, alignment, political party), strategies are different at different levels, obviously more lenient at lower levels.

Cheers,
Reaver

I think that's one of the ways the AI trys to beat you is by out-colonizing and they do a good job of it. Trick is to get your economy going earlier by using a heavy population and economy bonus. The AI will beat you in the beginning, but you can out-pace them further along in the game by flipping planets and running higher populations than they do. They tend to run only 5B on most of their planets.

Basically one recipie for a good economy is to keep morale up (I like >90%) to enhance population growth bonuses. This helps maximize my population and taxes.

Then I ensure that I build a lot of the trade center type of structures to give economic (tax) bonuses.

Don't go overboard building factories--this will eat you alive in terms of your economy. I give each colony 1-3 factories, depending on PQ. Then I designate some colonies my to be manufacturing powerhouses where I build ~10 factories each. These are the backbone for building the capital ships.

here's something that you might find useful,it's a general layout of a planet that i usually use (unspecialized):

Class 5+
1 Adv Factory or higher
1 farm (not on a bonus, you'll wanna research farm's later and bonus's make it a pain)
1 Stockmarket (adds economy and moral)
1-2 Moral boosting building.
1 spaceport

after that add things you feel the planet might need. the farm is used to help fight off invasions (extra soldiers) and to make the planet more profitable (for some reason, the army pays taxes, not the navy however)

On class 4 planets or other lower, you generally wanna specialize in money if you are having economy troubles or on research if your not, but don't bother with military production on these
Class 4:

1. Adv Factory (you may want to buy to get things going)
1 farm (still not on bonus
2 Moral Boosting buildings
(Replace Factory) 1 Stockmarket.

the planet then produces money with little or no trouble later. it's population is generally 100% happy, and without a spaceport and all the spaces full you got a planet with low costs producing money. these are useful to support bigger planets and newer colonies that aren't producing, or are losing money.

hope this helps

Make sure you grow your population quickly at the beginning. Do this by building a morale building or two on your homeworld and adjusting taxes so your homeworld's approval is at 100%. This doubles the planet's pop growth.

Put 500 million people on each colony ship you build. On every planet you colonize, start with a factory, then build a morale building to get 100% morale on the new planet. You will be losing money, and when it runs out, then you can jack up taxes. Go as high as you can as long as none of your planets have less than 40% morale. That should get you through the initial colonization.

In the long term, it pays to specialize your planets. It's best to specialize your high PQ planets for economy. This is because the tax output of a planet is proportional to the square root of the planet's population multiplied with it's economic bonus. So you want to have a large population and many economic buildings on the same planet. On a PQ 15, I'd put something like 3 factories, 1 starport, 2 farms, 3 morale buildings, and 6 economic buildings.