Early stage strategy for large map?

Are you playing scattered, clusters, rare, abundant planets?

At the transition from med. to large, the only things I really change are my starting bonuses.

It's about this time I find it useful to take some extra range/speed in the beginning.

Of course, if you're playing abundant clusters...then you wouldn't really need the bonuses too much.

On large maps...I favor having the bulk of my planets in just one or two sectors so I can "consolidate" my starbases and give bonuses to the maximum number of planets with a single mod. I also like extra trade routes with added social production and research. When playing large maps, I like becoming the trade "nexus". All routes come to my corner, so the starbases earn all the $$$$$ to fuel my military and keep me out of trouble. It keeps the relationships warm as well.

Later on, all you have to figure out is what kind of victory you're going for. This method is successful for me with everything up to and including PAINFUL...anything harder than that and the computer goes to war with me once they know who and where I'm located (because they're far ahead of me in military)

Thank you for your tip!
Just one quick question.
If we have bulk of planets in a single sector, doesnt it decrease our influence overall?

Put 100% of your spending into military-colony ships for the opening phase of the game. When you turn on social and research depends on when you encounter the AI and when the 15+ planets are mostly taken. On gigantic, I may be producing nothing but colony ships for 20-30 turns. I don't reccommend leasing a colony ship unless you're in a hurry to grab a key system. Remember that you only need to claim one planet per star, and can fill in the rest later.

Remember that it only takes 1 population point to colonize a planet. I don't bother with scouts on abundant. I just send colony ships to every star. I don't put too much population per colony ship, as I will use transports to move my population later.

Since the AI knows where the yellow stars are in advance, it gets a huge bonus on rare. On abundant, the AI's free stellar cartography matters less, because there are more yellow stars.

I find that 70-0-30 ration on the spending sliders works fairly well, because this allows you to crank out colony ships while at the same time pushing research. I find that I usually gear my research toward Diplo translators and Grav Accel first, then rush to phasers to build offense, then tossup between rushing toward aphrodisiac or frictionless clothing.

When you have your outerring of colonies complete, change your inner ring to constructors. Once you hit a technology that lets you do defenders, starfighters, etc, convert those constructors to them, that way you can raise your military bar.

Once you're out of the colony phase, I find that going 40-30-30 works best since I need to get social moving so that my planets can do more for me. I usually do about 75% planets on military and the other 25% on constructors

Seems to work all the way to the painful level. Painful level is a bit iffy because you're basically in a tech race with everyone. I found that as of the new patch, the trade goods were still enough to go inciting wars between rivals. This turned out to be a boon for me as I was about to lose the arms race with the Torians until the Drengins and Acreans got into it with them. Now I'm safely in the lead militarily, and waiting for my Dread fleet to come online so I can take the fighting to them

SeanB

Thank you all

Thanks for the spending ratio hints, forceinfinity (fsk+ too, though I already was doing the 100% colony ship thing at the beginning)...

Going 100% military, 100% government spending, and doing all colony ships (maybe a scout here or there) definately seems the way to go at the start... but I've noticed that if I stay in that too long I have difficulty catching up in the tech race and the lag in getting to phasers and building my star fighter swarm puts me dangerously close to "give us 1500 bcs or we'll take all those nice looking planets you beat us to in the colony ship rush"-land... so 70-0-30 is becoming more and more attractive.

The compromise I'm thinking of is:
go 100-0-0 until 30% research will get you at least 26-27 points a turn,
then go 70-0-30, get comm theory in 2 turns, uni translator the next turn, weapons theory 2 turns after that, and phasers a number of turns after that, then shift a few of your inner colonies to pump out star fighters to keep the alien mafia away (my tech choices after that would be diplomacy to shift to republic, med theory and basic env control to get habs and industrial theory-propulsion theory-cold fusion-interstellar refining to get fusion power plants and manufacturing centers).
When the colony ship rush is over (you've got colony ships targeted at all uncolonized systems in range with a 15+ planet, or at least have enough colony ships near completion to achieve that) switch to 40-30-30 to get those soil enhancements, habs, and banking centers online while continuing down the tech tree and pumping out colony ships to backfill, star fighters to keep the military graph up (maybe defenders if you expect an actual war), a few freighters when you get trade, and get a good start on a few constructors to grab any resources you find.

Oh, one thing about resources I haven't seen mentioned around here (I'm sure it came up really early on) : if you see an enemy constructor heading for one of your unclaimed resources and you can't beat it with one of your own and don't want to shoot it down (causing a war)... surround it with 8 ships I've found myself using star fighters since I have so many kicking around, but even sensor drones would do. In any case, the enemy constructors can't get to the resource and they keep piling up... I've seen ~20 Arcean constructors piled up in a queue waiting for a gap in my star fighter ring around a resource... if I had felt mean at the time, that could have been quite the turkey shoot ... this is all quite "cheese"-y, though, I'm sure.

I think the blockade tactic got eliminated with the 1.04 patch. I've not attempted setting up a blockade, but I could've sworn I read somewhere that blockades were being removed. I could very well be wrong on this

As mentioned above, those trade goods may not be as good for trading techs, but can still help you out if you want to "encourage" one empire to attack another. As stated above, I used this against the Torians because they were passing me militarily. I ended up employing the tactic again against the Acreans before I finally got my dreadnaught fleet online. At that point I struck. The rest as they say is history, because by the time the Acreans fell, the Yor yielded to the Altarians who in turn surrendered to the Drengins. Meanwhile I was running over the Drengins and finally got to the Torians before winning culturally.

SeanB

I think the blockades that were eliminated in 1.04 were the "surround a star to prevent ships produced there from coming out" blockades, I'm referring to the "surround a resource to prevent enemy constructors from building an SB on it" kind of blockades, which I have successfully employed in 1.04.59.

I think the star-blockades were eliminated by simply popping the leaving ship out in the nearest unoccupied square.

I use 75-0-25 or 80-0-20 in the early phases on a gigantic world.

I don't claim to be an expert though. I have difficulty with games higher than Painful.

Okay...that makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up.

SeanB