Like alot of folks, I get somewhat frustrated in the early game, and if I manage to make it past the first fifty turns or so without getting pummeled, then I know I've won. To me though its the second half of the game that is the most fun--when you finally have a fleet that can stand up for itself, and you can tell the bullying Drengin to go pack sand--or demand a tithe from THEM for a change.

I wish Accelerated Start had an option to play a different race than Human. I play various custom races, and any race I play without Super Diplomacy seems to engender anger by the other races and early declarations of war--especially by the Altarians (I can't tell you the number of times I wanted to wipe that sneer off that Altarian chick's face!)

I cannot bring myself to play other than "tough" though, because I don't want to take any artificial advantage over the computer.

The initial colonization phase is pretty frustrating if you don't play it right. I know as I had restarted many times due to some mismanagement. Now I finally got a hold on this by incorporating my experience along with forum discussions. Threads like this really helped out hammering out some rough edges on this all important phase especially on Tough setting.

On Tough, the initial phase seemed to be consists of a colonization rush to ALL habitable planets within starting ranges, followed by a galactic resource rush. It really helps if your starting race has inherited/modified economical bonus & moral bonus for this phase (max them first, then pick other abilities). I took the above advice and built/buy an economy building as the first in a new colony as it makes my starting money last a bit longer. Anyway, money makes the AI go around in this game and I'm trying to prove this by playing as Korx in my current game for their maxed trading techs.

Most people tend to get into economic trouble early because they think the early game is all about grabbing planets. The primary goal of the game at the start should be to get your economy making money before your reserves run out. That's not to say grabbing planets isn't important, but a balance needs to be struck. You need to be able to grab as many planets as you can afford, not as many planets as you can. Grab the biggest planets you can straight away, remember that if you have a small planet near you and the AI grabs it, it will usually flip over to you anyway due to influence if you have larger worlds near it. Bigger is more important than closer.

what I usually do is set my homeworld up as an economic world early no matter what. It will be your highest pop world long into the game and cramming it full of economic buildings is THE most effective way to support your colonies. I usually set up my second or third planet as a production world by fast buying a couple of factories and then use that world to pump out colony ships, if I don't have enough settlers I'll launch it with 1 pop and pick up colonists from my homeworld. A manufacturing tile makes this strategy even more effective.

Contrary to what others are saying it's a really bad idea to build an economic building on newly colonized worlds straight away, without factories it will take forever to build, and without a sizable population the financial gain is neglegible. Much better to get that economy building on your homeworld instead and concentrate on building infrastructure on your new worlds while waiting for the pop to rise to the point where building a market is actually worthwhile.

Also I'm really careful in the beginning of the game with money, I almost never fast buy anything other than factories and I rarely fast buy more than 1 colony ship in the early colony rush, it just becomes too expensive. Once my funds dip below around 5000BC I'll usually stop fast buying all together. The funds you start the game off with should be viewed not as free cash, but as a time limit to get your economy up and running, once that hourglass hits zero if you're still losing money per turn it's often going to equate to a loss.

Some really good tip in here!

I hope Frogboy is readng this as he could change the colony rush phase for the AI. The hazardous enviroments did hinder colony rush phase a bit but with a few tweaks for AI the colony rush phase could be even slower and more enjoyable for the player. As people have said in this thread, AI is basicly shooting itself in the foot with its overly aggressive colony rushing strategy most of the time that is.

As with a lot of things in this game there is no single *right* way to do things. A wide variety of build strategies, colonizing strategies, and general empire management strategies will and do work. The trick is to find the set of strategies that make sense to you and play to the strengths of your race.

For me I buy that first econ building not build so I'm not waiting for that first factory anyway. Also every planet of mine gets at least 1 sometimes 2 econ buildings but may get no factories. Sometimes I like most of my planets to have to wait for upgrades so my economy has time to adjust to the sudden influx of buildings that double or more their maintenance costs. I know I could shut off the governor but then that leads to too much micromanaged . Then with all my extra cash I just buy things I need outright. Most of my empires are 2 - 3 factory worlds, 3 - 4 research worlds, and the rest tourist traps .

At the end of the day it really makes no difference how you got there so long as your economy is positive and you can afford to start building your fleets.

I'd be very hard pressed to believe that fast buying a market on a newly colonised world would be worth it, but I haven't crunched the numbers so I can't say for sure.

You'd need to make more off that market than the cost of the fast buy in the time it takes you to get a market normally in order to make it worthwhile. With a low population on a newly colonised world I would hardly think that's possible.

I agree, it's not worth it to rush-buy markets, but I don't think this is exactly why. There's a cascading effect. You're not just building that market, say, 4 turns earlier--you're building every subsequent market 4 turns earlier as well. So if you're going to build 10 markets on that planet, that's potentially 40 turns * 10% of bonus income, and at higher populations.

The reason I still don't think it's worth it is, by the time you build those 10 markets you probably don't need the money anymore.