Valsharak

Thanks, I appreciate the info. I need it. I reckon I'll try slower building with more economy emphasis and trading. I haven't done anything with tourism yet. I should have ended with my bigger concern though: how are players supposed to learn the meta game info? There don't seem to be in game resources and the community seems pretty established such that there isn't a good way to enter as a new person and learn how to play.

Quick background: Long time fan of 4x games but have only played them very causally. Played GalCiv 1 and 2 but only at easy and normal and not all that much. I play MMOs and RTS more competitively and am a pretty serious min-maxer in them. I bought Gal Civ 3 last weekend and played two games on easy after one level of the tutorial. Lost the 1st and won the 2nd culturally. I vaguely noticed that there was some thing to control global and planetary production but I decided to just ignor