Birth of the Federation

Anyone have any tips for proper spread of planetary production? Normally systems of 500 or more I focus on just factories for ship production. Systems below 500 I use to produce science, espionage, power, and production. I just cant seem to find the right balance.

I also dont see how anyone could play the cardassians at low tech.

I personally make any system with 400+ a factory system at least in the beginning as you need industry. Once things are going and I have lots of ships and 40 or 50 systems I get a lot more picky unless I am fighting a lot of battles and losing ships.

Are you talking population? What mods are you guys using?
In the game I've been playing, 400 was the highest population I've seen and I think that was the Cardassian homeworld. The best planets are in the 300 range with 250+ being good planets.

40 or 50 systems? That seems like how many systems are in a large galaxy.

Are you using mods to increase the planet population and the number of planets in the galaxy?
If so, what mods should I have installed in the game?

Please forgive the newbie playing the vanilla game asking dumb questions.

Correct. The number is the population of the system (max anyway).

I usually play Ultimate Dominion or Ultimate Mods. On large I end up with 150+ systems. It does take the mods to get 500, 600, 700 populations.

Population increase does not require mods; just use UE and set the population limits for the different kind of planets;
At galaxy generation; for regular system the game will stop adding planets when pop is above 400; minor systems and home worlds are not affected by this limit. I had minors with up to 800. Though you can't have more than 60 industries built or the workforce allocation gets buggy.

About workforce distribution, in my universe with populations between 260 and 500, i always have up to 20 factories, whatever food and energy i need, usually 3+3 but it depends on the system bonuses and the rest i chose between intel or science. In the beginning of the game i go mainly for science with only a few intel systems; as the since goes up, i focus more on intel since you will always need that.

Small UE trick; make the cost of main buildings the same, the upgrade cost is the cost difference * how many buildings you have so 0 times something is 0 and it takes only one turn; here is how to do it: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2568#p35984

what's UE? just follow Editing Tools -> Ultimate Editor -> Ultimate Editor from the main page
or viewtopic.php?f=125&t=22