Lots of empty End Turns

Pretty much. The first part of the game is often building ships and sending them on one-way trips, either as colonies or constructors. How much you have to do is directly related to how much you already have, so the process can take a while to build on itself.

There is some micromanaging and optimizing you could probably do, but it's not really necessary on anything less than masochistic, and most people (including me) don't generally bother.

Thanx... May I ask what is a normal or average number of empty turns?

Varies wildly based on galaxy size, planet count, number of races, tech rate, etc. On a huge galaxy, it will be the first year or more, on a tiny map it may be 15-20 turns.

If you feel like it, you CAN rush the invasion tech, and that pumping out troop ship instead, it's a viable stratagem.

In a gigantic/abundant galaxy, every turn requires some thought and some action. In a small galaxy with only a few planets per race, there seems to be alot of that empty turn clicking. I think the bigger games are more interesting, but can also require too many repetive and mundane actions.

It can also depend on what speed you have the technology research set to. For instance if you set the tech speed (in the initial game options) to fast it does not take very long to research most of the techs, so you will find yourself doing things most turns. However if you have the tech speed set to very slow there can be a lot of turns you need do nothing. That said setting the tech speed to very slow and using the immense galaxy size can lead to an epic of a game.

Best thing is to experiment with the settings until you find the setting you like the best. Myself, i always have a huge/immense galaxy with the tech speed set to very slow as i like to see that every tech researched actually does something for the game rather than just blitzing through the techs on your way to the top update.

well, in my games i do not have empty turns at all, dunno why

I know this is a huge request, but considering some of my other "off the wall" requests, this is not out of the norm for me... Would anybody be willing to write up a turn by turn analysis of a game? Using the default game settings? Like a walkthru of an actual game? The walkthru guide that is available doesn't list turn by turn, and I would learn better by example instead of a brief write up of achieveing general goals... Yeah, I know it's a lot to ask, but I'm asking anyways...