[Bman]

Everyone is talking about building cargo storage early on. I say fooey on that. If you have surplus minerals after about 10 turns in a 1-planet start then you are doing something wrong and not expanding fast enough. And during the first 10 turns your planet should be busy building space station yards and colony ships. If you waste 3 slots on cargo storage, that's 1500 research points per turn or 1800+ resources per turn you could be getting instead. That pays the mineral cost required by a working space-yard each turn! With those extra points you can expand that much faster.

In a recent MP game I conquered another empire that only had about 6 planets to my 30 when we met and I was his only neighbor. I didn't understand it, but as I landed troops on all of his planets I kept finding resource storage units.

My strategy in the early game is to operate in the red and constantly increase my resource PRODUCTION so I can produce more faster. Send out colony ships like crazy and research some combat technologies early (either ship size or weapons or shields or armor or sensors or something) so that when you make first contact you will be able to build a ship capable of holding its own.