[LGM]

I have several friend that I play SEIV with and the standard opening is Emergeny build 10 turns with the home world. Variation: If you have a high shipyard reate, you might buil a few escort ships at normal build for a turn or two and then go crazy building colonizers. You can use the Last couple of turns to build orbital shipyards, however, I only recommend doing that if you have no good places to send a colonizer or if you start next to a possible rival. Generally, you want your construction capability on your frontiers, not in the middle of your empire. You want to stake your claim early on, so you should not even send your first couple of colonizers to colonize in your home system, if you can help it. If you send ships immediately to all your adjacent systems, you will see if there is a danger and you can adjust your building to reflect that (switch to orbital bases, if necessary).

Exception: Only use this if colonization is wide open. If you are only allowing breathable atmostpheres, then you do not need all the colonizers as colonizable world will be relatively rare. You might build a few colonizers initially and switch over to bases in this sort of game.