How to Expand?

[th3freakie]

Colonize every single reasonably habitable planet, or only those that will expand your borders? Keep direct control of the central planets or of the new colonies? Use minor species or only primary?

I keep hitting these questions around 5-10 planets and my expansion significantly slows down. Meanwhile I see AI empires spanning dozens of planets when I'm barely at 8.

 

[Summin Cool]

What you do is build an extra science ship to explore faster.
Then Spam Frontier Outposts (Cheaper and faster) so you claim as much space as you can on planets, they can't colonize planets they don't own.
Your first colony should be about 2207ish If remember the strat well enough.

Hope this helps.

 

[FonVegen]

Well, if your fisrt priority goes to conquering more distant planets, you later can colonize the planets already within your borders. Of course there is also the issue of xenophobes and some empires putting their colonies within your space... so tread with caution if you do that, or build frontier outposts in order to get around the second issue.

Minor species (uplifted?) can be great as long as you're not xenophobic yourself, and getting multiple species with different climate preferences can be great to drop colonies on every single planet (or just build synths when you can, although that might kill your energy economy if you don't prep for that).
Also, you probably want to give your well developed central worlds to sectors and keep your new colonies while turning off redevelopment, otherwise the sector AI will in my experience take quite a while to build up new colonies, and when it does, it might not be the way you want it.


All of the above are things I do or at least tried in singleplayer, and they worked for me.

EDIT: The synth thing is rather mid- to lategame, so it might not help you immediately, and I just realized that now.

 

[WandererRTF]

My route would be:

1) Split your initial 'fleet' into three scouts and send them scouting - three scouts won't make a dent on anything so you are better off doing something useful with them. Like spotting potentially habitable worlds.
2) Build another science ship and get a scientist for it. Use it to survey the interesting pieces the 3 scouts come across.
3) Since there is often a tad of a rush early on... do not necessarily survey the whole of the system, just habitable planets and the star. First so that you know if it is worth the bother to start pushing for that colony and the second in case you need to secure the system with a frontier outpost first. Do that also for planets which are not currently habitable for you (even tomb worlds) since with terraforming those can be of value too.
4) Even if you come across actual empires do not research the alien races (uses society) - instead research colony ships first, then you can do what you want. Given that reward is often just influence you usually don't really need it all that much.

So as to the question...

I wouldn't colonize every habitable world but then again i wouldn't concentrate on expanding my own borders either - you need to adapt to the situation. Since borders do extend more if they are linked it is often beneficial to expand borders but then again you shouldn't concentrate on that. Downside of early aggressive expansion is that your technological progress will be slow & your fleet will be small - meaning some one will start a war against you. So if you get a colony to a system close to a potential opponent's borders make sure to build a base on it. Additional 1k - 1.5k base does wonders in the early game corvette skirmishes. I would make the first colonies into a sector just to free up space - besides those might have enough on them to keep them alive without needing to be continuously fed as is the case with new colonies. Race choice really depends on your own race and the governing ethics.