[Suicide Junkie]

First thing to do is spend some racial points on maintenance reduction. It helps a LOT.

Next, only defend wormholes leading into your systems, not individual planets. Find chokepoints, and defend those only.

Use units. Fighters, mines, satellites, weapon platforms are all zero-maintenance, and will be quite effective.

Don't build resource storage. They just eat up planet space. Build another mineral miner, even if the planet is only 50%. Either that, or build a research facility.
income is better than a savings account with no interest.

Last, learn to build more effective ships. No matter what you're doing now, there's always a slightly better way.

Work with your racial traits. If you have great offence, add more guns. If you have great defence, add shield regenerators to boost your shields in between the occasional hits.

Learn to use tactical combat effectively, or work out the best strategic battle plans. Either way, use the combat simulator lots design two ships, and let them fight it out. See which one wins. Modify that one, and start another combat. Darwinian selection will get you a pretty darn good ship. Don't forget to be sure it can fight the enemy, and not just your own ships.

I once defended my 6-system empire with a mere 4 Cruisers for 10 years.
With one finely tuned, legendary ship blocking each warp point leading into my empire, and making pre-emptive strikes against any opponents who showed up, they worked wonders on very little maintenance.

[This message has been edited by suicide_junkie (edited 09 April 2001).]