averagedan

I said above several times that it won't be as efficient - I've agreed with you. Still works :D

This is a bit gamey but you can get the AI to stop using your designs pretty easily. Always go for the minaturization specialisation and fill your ships to the brim. Then never trade the techs and the enemy won't be able to build your designs. The AI seems to place a really low priority on minaturization when IMHO it's the best (by far over the industry bonus and slightly preferable over the effectiveness bonus).

@psychoak - you're right that just adding one specialised building will increase production massively for one attribute and I said something to that effect in my post. My point was that if you go crazy for industry/pop and you're not using the govern trait it cuts out a huge amount of waste from specialised worlds wasting a large portion of their spending (i.e. research worlds are pretty bad at producing lots of industry and wealth - every BC spent on those wealth and industry o

@Gavin - my idea about the terraforming, I said combine the two - you would still only be able to build the improvement in the correct squares just with fewer mouse clicks! As to having more worlds I normally get about 8 or so in the initial colony rush on a large scattered map, I have no idea if that's about the same as you? What I've been doing so far is as follows and it's working like a charm: Manually send your scouts to near