I mostly just calculation how long before my ships will run out of supplies, VERY important with a QNP system like Adamant. The results are surprising sometimes. Every so often I'll build a nice fancy 10 speed ship only to find out that it will run dry in only 3 turns. What's really bad is when I DON'T catch it and I send the design to production.
Occasionally I'll figure out how many resource facilities I need before I build a resource booster, but most of the time I just take a guess.