first few turns?

I buy industrial, a colony, and maybe a scout. after that I save money as I can. I also tend to just buy the first industrial pad for each colony.

The idea of buying the first factory is pretty good and I might try doing that. The scout would also be a good choice in a big map game.

I have been adjusting the sliders where I get my first Earth colony ship in 7 weeks and soon after that they are coming every 5 weeks. That has been sufficient to dominate a tiny or small map on normal difficulty without rush buying anything early on. On a small or tiny map Earth usually builds all colony ships. The other planets start on constructors as soon as they build a starport

At higher difficulty small things can be critical and the idea of buying factories early sounds pretty good

Personally I've done this with my initial funds and its worked well so far... give me any feedback you like:
Just buy the initial factory on all new planets
Save all my money.. this allows me to crank up my industrial capacity usage up to 95%+ and if I take a loss of a few BC's each week its not a huge deal.
Make tons and tons of ships.. many of them just hulls with engines untill I get weapon tech's and some defense and planetary invasion (make mostly small hulls and cargo hulls)
Upon completion of said weapon techs + invasion I go and design my ships (troop ship and fighters) and upgrade my entire fleet (usually costs me around 3.5K BC)
Then I zerg the closest planets till I run out off troop transports, use the rest of my cash to do Information Warfare
By the end of my zerg I've usally got about 3-5 captured planets and my military has gone from 0 in one quarterly report to about 150-250 the next.

Any advice/feedback and even constructive criticism of my idea plz foward it on to me.
Any better ideas.... then DEFINATLY forward them on

Cykophrog
His Imperial Majesty the Lord High Ruler of the Terran Hegemony

Can you buy more then one ship or planet structure a turn. I thought not, but I only played about half a game yesterday so I could be wrong.

I buy 5-6 Colony Ships and take all habitable planets I can get. with some luck I find 2000 Credits in an anomaly so I buy even more. as the AI is really fast taking up all planets its very important to secure as many planets as you can.

I generally set military spending to 0, and split social/research 50/50. Buy a factory to start, as well as a custom-designed sensor drone (beats scouts big-time). Then buy colony ships each turn utnil I run out of cash, at which point I rachet military spending back up so I'm at 60/20/20 and do it the old fashioned way from there.

In both of the games I've played so far, the first thing I've used my money for was to buy some form of factory. So far it seems that buying a factory is the best way to jump start a colony, as everything will take obscene amounts of time to build otherwise. Luckily Factories don't cost to much to buy.

Here's my first turn.... I generally play on Large, Huge, or Gigantic sized maps against Intelligent level AI.

+ Set research to the next engine tech. Speed kills in this game and it's even more crucial during the colony rush.
+ Design all new versions of colony, constructor, scout ships. SPEED KILLS. Colony ships are now at half capacity but twice as fast. Scouts have massive sensors.
+ Purchase a basic factory, queue up the following: basic factory, market center, market center, food, morale, market center
+ set planet focus to social (soon as that second factory is finished, I re-focus the planet to military)
+ purchase a new colony ship
+ scout as much as I can with the ships provided, hoping to unveil a juicy target for my new colony ship.
+ as soon as all the movement points are used up on the survey ship, I have it move to all the known anomalies. When you tell a survey ship to move to an anomaly it displays "Soldiering01" "Economy01" as it's destination, I do this every turn I see new anomalies because there are certain ones you want to avoid... the biggest one being the wormhole... the wormhole on a big map can put a serious crimp on your early game colony rush because of the lack of scouting.
+ open up domestic info screen, set spending to 100%, taxes I raise until I have ~50% approval. Remember, as it stands right now, there is no useful difference between 51% and 100% approval. I also adjust the spending sliders to 0/50/50 (mil / social / research) because Ill be purchasing colony ships every turn I need to maximize my other projects. After Ive purchased 3 or 4 colony ships, or if Im down to around 800-1000bc, ill reset the sliders to 34 / 33 / 33 and never touch it again unless absolutely necessary.

I buy my sensor drone scout on turn 2, then colony spam after that until I cant afford it.