There is an option to "Govern" a planet you can set production to Civil or military.

you can speed up production and research rates in the new game setup.

You can build more factories, have moral that is 100% and use clustering to get bonuses. You can also increase your population.

build all factories and population improvements on your home planet, and set it to build 100%.

Yeah, the tutorial is limiting in a number of ways, mainly to get your feet wet and understand the mechanics.  Perhaps it would be good for the tutorial to set the game pace differently. Don't know how that would impact other parts of the tutorial  But conceptually, I'd think a tutorial is designed to just help a player understand the mechanics of the game, rather than make a player play an actual mini-game.  

Quoting ZubaZ,

reply 7

The QA guys (might) have tried speed running the tutorial.

I won't say what the lowest number of turns is (unless asked) but one of the infrastructure guys got to 600+ turns before he quit.  (I think he had fun during most of those turns though. 

Good Lord!

I know you have already received some assistance here but I wanted to chime in. Hopefully I can add something helpful for you.

The tutorial is intended to show you how to do some basic management, but it does not elaborate on everything. Your shipyard production is a result of what your planet can produce and send it. You can increase production on planets that sponsor a shipyard to increase the shipyards production rate. In addition to that you can also adjust what a planet(s) populace are working on by using the govern button in the upper right. If you desire you can reduce the focus on wealth and/or research to have them increase manufacturing. There is also a slider bar to determine what percentage of manufacturing is provided to social or military(shipyards). Playing with all of these features will allow you to better control the way your citizens spend their time working.

Ships have logistic points. The bigger the ship the more points it is... in general anyways. Fleets can only be as big as X logistics. so if your logistics is 10, then you could have 2 ships if their logistics are 5, or 3 ships if their logistics are 3. You can increase your logistics through tech. The stacked fleets are probably just to many points for 1 fleet. It might also be possible that since they are assigned the fleet status that they might not bunch up. I'm not certain on that. When there are stacked ships, which is noted by the little icon on them you can click the top one and manage the stacks using the ui in the lower left. You will see arrows next to manage.

Hopefully this has helped some.

How many turns did they get it down to?

Can I get some help with the basics on the tutorial and the first campaign mission? I've tried both and they are tremendously non-fun and non-helpful.

I basically lost the tutorial when myfrigate died andit would be hundreds of turns to research anywhere near the techs needed to attack the drengin panet and they had hordes of of starbases all over and I was being swallowed up by iconian influence. Restarted and needed something bordering on a thousand turns to get a fleet strong enough to beat the drengin homeworld defenders. I tried the first campaign, but got my starting fleet chiseled down to nothing by pirates on all the anomalies, the drengin fleets, all their dozens of starbases etc. Eventually I had only the one uber ship and my anomaly scouter by itself and that's when they invaded my worlds and I lost.

Yes I followed the advice to build all factories on the homeworld. Yes I know about assigning multiple worlds to a starbase. Yes I know about clustering buildings of the same type for a higher bonus. It's really hard when on every world the capital has no adjacent tiles (been true on 13 out of 15 worlds so far). And I'll echo the sentiment about constructors being hugely unhelpful to new players. If the default designs suck, can we get better defaults added in a future patch? Or can someone who has a better design please post your design so I can at least try it. Just saying "a few techs" isn't too helpful... which ones? Please remember, I don't know which techs do what yet.

So ZubaZ, if you can do it that fast, can you give me a step-by-step summary so I can try to reproduce it and thus learn what does and doesn't work? Because I'm really not having fun. Like what is the best use for teh duranium build a ship or one of those upgraded factories? Which resource clusters are worth mining and which are better to ignore? What does it take to be able to defeat one of the 200-hp starbases? The 150hp ones have a 50/50 chance to defeat the frigate, the 200hp ones will always kill it plus up to 2 other ships. In the Arcea campaign mission the one super ship can take a 200hp station, but not if it has a fleet of guards. And any escorts you send with the uber ship just die off and are nearly irreplaceable at my level of production and cash-income.

Anyone have screenshots of the worlds from the tutorials that you used to beat it so I can at least see "factories here, research there, food over thataways" etc? How about government slider advice? Again, please be specific by turns/objectives, don't just say what the slider does, I got that, but when to set it at what levels.

Those are the biggest issues I'm having. Any specific help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.