1. YES (ALSO transports will dissapear but nto all of em, if you attack weith a fleet and don't loose so many people in ground combat, you may only loose one of the whole fleet)

2. Depends on what you like, I would not put too many famrs to start with thou. On a gigantic map I tend to queue a lot, unless its the begining of the game.

3. Don't, you should try to go more balanced because early techs are cheaper. Also tailor your research to your strategy. You might want to for example research the next level of factories before you build a new fleet. And upgradign factories before upgrading labs is a good idea too.

4. Not that I know of.

5. Practice and civilization manager.

6. Depends at the point of the game. Sometimes I migh hit the next turn right away too. If there's nothign going on, no need ot make work for yourself. But other turns can take 20 minutes.

I dunno.. I found beelining all the way through the diplomatic techs gave me some nice tech sale prices.

1) Colony ships and constructor ships are used up in the colonization/construction process. Colony ships provide the base material for the original colony and constructors also provide the base material for their projects.

2) Setting the build queue and leaving things alone works well, but as the others have said, you should check in from time to time. Especially after you've researched soil and habitat improvements.

3) What they said, research things more balanced. If you are playing the game on a lower difficulty you will start to see the benifits of a balanced approach once you start the harder settings.

4) no time limit. Whoever can claim a tech victory, influence victory, kill everyone, etc first wins. At the beginning you choose what victory conditions you will allow.

5) Practice. The more you play, the more you will get a feel of how to organize things.

6) I'f I've nothing moving, then I'll do the same. If I've ships approaching an enemy, or am expecting an invasion, etc, I'll look around and check things out before hitting that turn button. If you really want to be surprised, ignore the enemy completely. They'll get your attention when they start landing troops.

I dunno.. I found beelining all the way through the diplomatic techs gave me some nice tech sale prices.

yeah, but shouldn't getting some research tech speed up that bee?

and some manufacturing techs speed up building of the research facilities?

and some econ techs to keep all that production and research from bankrupting the treasury?

and some drive techs to help win the early-game land-grab rush, providing the places to build the research facilities and the tax base (population) to pay for them?

all that said, yep, i completely ignore weapons and defense tech until somebody picks a fight with me, then i trade for something to hold them off with, while i rush research whatever weapons and defense i'll use for the counterstrike.

... and bigger hulls, and miniaturization, when they completion times drop low enough compared to what ever else is left.

and at that point having built up production facilites on a lot of planets, producing enough ships fast enough isn't too hard.

i'll find out next game if that still works when my enemies are "Intelligent".

build an Orbital Fleet Manager.

Wow thank you all for your quick replies. This is a great community and very helpfull. Off to play some more of my new addiction. I am playing at beginner level for now.

I keep hearing about having ships orbiting a planet. How do you do that?

Also if you research technologies i.e. propulsion do all your ships get upgraded automatically or do you have to manually upgrade each one of them?

Sorry to bombard you with all these questions but I am very excited with this new great game. I have been a long time player of the Total War series and now I have ventured into the unknown

Question
Doesn't the orbital fleet manager let ALL the ships in orbit fight as one?

If so, you can easily exceed your natural logistic limits and grant you a big advantage.
But truthfuly I've never had that come up, I always fly out to meet the challenge