LRFs or Ice/Volcanic Collonization?
So, you start the game an take the nearby asteroid... where to next? You can easily clear ice and volcanic worlds but you can't colonize them without 2 civic labs and their repsective techs. You can colonize desert and terran worlds but they can be difficult to clear without LRFs and the 1-3 military labs and the tech research required to produce them (race dependent, of course).
When I go for the LRFs I find it hard to scrape together the funds to get the tech and build the actual ships. When I go for the colony tech I don't have much of a fleet to do any fighting. You can't do both because you don't have the resources or the logistics space. Either way, it seems like I'm sitting around doing practically nothing waiting to get enough funds to move on.
So which do you go for in the early game- LRFs or Colonization tech?