1) Maintenance on research and manufacturing buildings goes up in both DA and subsequently in TA, but initial colony buildings start producing more base mp and tp.  Tourism becomes more lucrative in TA.  There are different opportunities to advance your economy, but more ways to run it into the ground.

2) All-X has the advantage of giving you full benefit from the sliders.  Even without an All-X strategy though, a good start and good choices can give you a significant lead early on.  In DA and TA especially, the benefit from using Focus is lessened.  It's still a groovy thing to use on specialised worlds, but asteroid mining (the output of which you can redirect to any colony) can provide a whole lot of maintenance-free mps, so on some worlds you might not need to use it.

3) Can't say I noticed a difference.  With it on they have tended to trade away valuable techs for peanuts.  However if you can live with that, there is now a Disable Tech Brokering option which when checked only allows civs to trade technologies which they originally researched.

4) For DL, it's pretty much accurate.  With the rising maintenance in DA and TA, you need to find ways to keep that miantenance down until your economy is built

5) Depends what you mean by balanced.  If you mean building factories and labs on the same planet, that can work sometimes if the bonus tiles are there, but there's room in your empire to build all-factory or all-lab colonies if the funding is available.

6) As far as I know the funding and ability bonuses the AI gets on higher difficulty settings haven't changed much, but in DA and TA you can customise these to suit each opponent.

7) You can change your username by clicking My Account at the top of the page there, then choose the Login tab.

Thank you both for your responses.

When I said I out expanded every other civ, I did mean individually.  I ended up nearly twice the size of my nearest opponent.  My starting layout was average and I did not reroll the map to get a favourable start.  I was quickly out-producing and out-researching all of my opponents.  I will have to start a metaverse game soon on a tougher difficulty.

I am enjoying this game immensely however from what I am gathering there is still tile wastage in the two expansions, though in TA using focus and an all-factory strategy is slightly nerfed.

I actually find that this is one of the most irritating aspects of this game to be honest.

What I am going to say here is probably something which most people here have already realised, but I'm going to say it anyway.

If I build a factory and a research lab on a planet, one would expect that you can run both at maximum capacity at any one time if you can throw enough money at it.  I mean I find it a little stupid that you can have a planet of 100 million people with 12 factories, all of which are running at maximum capacity, but if you have six factories and six labs and 10 billion people you can either run only the factories, only the labs or only half the labs and half the factories.  Tile utilisation really should be either enabled by population (e.g. one billion per improved tile) or by how much I want to use the tiles by setting the sliders.  It should not automatically reduce my factory usage just because I want to use my labs as well.

Planet space is at a premium in galciv 2.  How you use your planets is and should be important.  Unfortunately the current system seems to benefit specialising your civ.  Why?  Well if you have 150 tiles spread over 15 same sized planets you can do several things.  You can build an even mix of everything on your planets (keeping it simple the only buildings are labs, factories, markets and starports) you have 15 tiles used by starports and lets say 30 labs, 30 factories and the rest (75) markets.  At any one time your civ is getting income from 75 markets and can produce 30 units of factory/lab production per turn.  Alternatively, you can use an all factory setup and run with 15 starports, 45 factories and 90 markets.  In this setup you are gaining 15 factories worth of production and simultaneously having 15 more markets to fuel those factories.  Your cost is that you can only produce 25% of your production as science (45 factories * .25 = 11.25 factories worth of science).  Now this is close, but obviously less than the 15 labs (average) worth of science that you would have put out in the first scenario.  However, you are gaining 18.75 factories worth of production and 15 markets worth of money extra that you would not have in the first scenario.

The above examples were ignoring the maintance costs and treating labs and factories as the same in production, which is not accurate.  I also assumed a non-specialised planetary setup - though in a real game it is likely that you would specialise some planets for military production and others for economic output, which would claim another half dozen tiles or so.  The other advantages to the all-factory method is that a ) your military is stronger earlier, giving both diplomatic and militaristic advantages (i.e. you can invade your neighbour!) b ) you get far more efficient use of your tiles in that you can run every tile at maximum output per turn and c ) you only need to technologically advance down the production tree instead of both the production and science trees.

Now someone please, correct me if I am mistaken, but if the production output slider only effected the military and social production, while the science slider was handled independently it would fix this efficiency loss and discourage an all-factory strategy (which IMO is a bit of a counter-intuitive strategy and seems cheesey).  It would also make the AI with its poor planetary planning a more effective opponent.  It seems a bit ridiculous that a totally new player can use this strategy and dominate his first game on tough difficulty.

It also seems to me that having maintanance costs tied to buildings also is a bit counter-intuitive (at least to the civ 4 player in me).  A "number of worlds" cost would seem to be more appropriate - giving you incentive to develop your worlds but not overexpand.  Though this point is minor - I am content with just not building any buildings for a few turns until I have enough taxes coming in at this stage.

Your suggestion makes a decent amount of sense, although some things would need to be reworked, most notably focus (which may need to be disabled entirely), however you are correct that this has been discussed approximately seven billion times previously and, to my knowledge, nothing ever really came of it.

For those who don't feel like reading everything he said, the basic idea is this: social/military is still shared, but research funding is separate from both of them-essentially a second slider for overall funding for research.

I can see how you might imagine that a world-based maintenance cost would be superior-but from my perspective it would not be.  As an example, 15 worlds with 1 factory each would cost you more in maintenance than 3 worlds with 15 factories each.  Now which of these are you going to get more usage out of?  Which benefits you more?  You have more room to expand in the former example, but the latter example is more turn-to-turn benefit.  (If you'd prefer, you can consider them to be labs instead.)

However, keeping that in mind, with DL's relatively low structure maintenance (and in fact DA's median structure maintenance), the initial colony's maintenance of ~12 (10 in TA) serves your purpose fairly well, although it might perhaps do it better.  The combination of significantly higher structural maintenance in TA along with somewhat lower colony maintenance makes it almost irrelevant in that expansion, though.

I would like to point out that simply because I believe a world-based maintenance system would not be a good idea, I am not opposed to it having some effect, like it does in DL, or perhaps more so.

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These are certainly worth consideration for GCIII, but I doubt at this late point in GCII's life that any such major change will be forthcoming.

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I finally moved beyond Tough a few months ago, having accepted the fact that the phenomenon that exists above those difficulties is not unbearably unfair (more on this later-not talking about the bonuses the AI gets), but at that point in time, I was outcolonizing all of the AIs...combined.  If you're able to outdo two AIs you may consider moving up to Masochistic, but I would not recommend much beyond that until later.

I tried to clarify above-I'm not opposed to it, I just think that by itself it isn't a better way of dealing with it.