Has anyone written a layman's treatise on the inner workings of the economy? It's been quite some time since I last played but I see people throwing around what is now conventional wisdom and it has me confused. It looks like I missed a lot in my absence.

As others have noted, the way the economy works is not just non-intuitive but counter-intuitive. I stopped trying to figure it out 30 minutes into my first game and have since just done "what seems right" at any given moment.

But I see talk of people setting their sliders at extremes (1/99) and building factories only, etc and I'm not sure I understand it. I tried monkeying around with it for a night but couldn't make it work.

So, can anyone point me in the right direction? I'm not looking for guide or a thread that reads like a formula-laden white-paper (I came across one of those last night) just something that sums up the most effective way to wring every last ounce of productivity out of the economy.

For example, I have the most basic of questions: Since apparently the basic unit of production in the economy is the BC and factories and labs merely convert them to MP or RP, how is it determined how much (many?) BC a planet produces each turn?

TIA