Citizen is how you specialize your planet now. Space wise, using all three; Space elevator, DCM, and spaceport together aren't worth since it eat up too many tile unless you want to specialize them. I found it is better just to surround Space elevator with factory since each elevator level give +1 All production. It take less tile this way and still give you a lot in both Social and Ship construction. You need more tile to taking care of your planet right now since colony that isn't capital start with only 1 Approval but colony itself can support 4 Population which will damage your approval rating quite fast. Entertainment center give +1 so you need 2 of them together to stabilize your colony if you want 100% approval for 4 pop. Farm give 2 foods which is enough to support 1 City but city itself can support 8 more pop which mean you going to need more morale improvement to counteract it.

They slow down the colony grow in Crusade quite severe. Colonizing low quality planet is ill to do unless you are out of option or want to expand your ship range. Colony should give 2 or 3 Approval to begin with in my view.

i think that is very intentional. More planets is not always a big increase like it is In the base game. Sometimes it pays to leave the dirt ball alone

Yes, sometime you gotta take it, or else. It also make you shift your priority to terraformer tech in order to improve those backwater planet back to tip top shape.

The whole expansion it seems is designed to throw off the usual strategy. For instance i had played 9 hours before today messing around and trying to learn how things worked after the changes. I played the same way that on gifted, i can be at the top and miles ahead of the tech rush by turn 100 and i find i am screwed all over. Even to the point where i have 20 planets and i'm ranked bottom (out of all races discovered) at turn 100 and even by turn 200, i am still at the bottom and the only consolation is being #1 for population & economy (i'm being beaten by AI with 7 planets). I think the way we used to play means we are screwed and i'm not sure if that is down to improved gameplay or the developers just wanting you to play the game longer due to the challenge.

Seperating food & population is a dick move and research/factories seems irrelavant against citzens

I expect my next game to be much better, i just didn't expect it to stop at turn 228 because the game can't handle it (i'm only playing immense and it's not the pc, it was £1700 custom build in febuary) I'm not being a dick but the first thing people usually ask about is spec etc.