I'm playing as Terrans with most of my ability points sunk into increased ship speed.  Here's the my basic strategy:

1) Tech rush to Universal Translators

2) Trade my Influence and non-diplomacy technologies for all other technologies + scout/miner ships.

3) Upgrade miner ships to constructors/colony ships.  Use scouts to explore.

4) Tech rush to Sensors MK3, while continue trading

5) Build Galactic Guidebook structure.

6) Upgrade most scouts to survey ships.

7) Grab most of the anomalies on the map.

I've found that the cost of upgrading a ships is EXTREMELY low if you're upgrading the design to another design which has the EXACT same cost and components.  Extremely low.  I can use this to "some" effect when upgrading miners to colony/constructor ships.  But...

... take a look at what the Galactic Guidebook structure does: it reduces the Survey module cost to 0.

With it, I can upgrade most (not all) of the other civs' scout ships to my newly design survey ships (I have two different versions, one costs 31 and the other 33) to survey ships for 5 BC each.  FIVE.  Normally, it would be 126 (or higher).

Using this strategy I can field a ridiculous number of survey ships. 

So many, in fact, that (once I get rolling) I can clear the map of anomalies in just a handful of weeks.

So, now my treasury is (relatively) through the roof, and I'm still colonizing/grabbing resources at a decent enough speed... but, I have all these survey ships in standby.  So, what do I do? 

I now start boxing in resources/planets that I haven't taken yet.  What is boxing?  I have so many ships that I can afford to devote them to creating boxes around planets/resources that I haven't claimed yet.  It takes a maximum of 8 ships to do this effectively... sometimes less, depending upon its location.  I can even box other the civs' flagships and planets. 

Why do this at all? 

Because ships cannot pass through other civs' ships, I have effectively quarantined the galaxy from the filthy aliens.

But, it's not all roses... Some things I could do faster when using another strategy, given the same amount of time.  Also, I will lose the first United Planets vote due to the amount of influence I traded away. 

I'm really just concerned whether the upgrade costs for the ships being so low is a bug. 

Forgive me if a similar strategy was posted elsewhere... If not, I hereby claim to have coined the term 'boxing'.