Currently economics are irrelevant. Ships cost one to build and base empire resource production is 50K. The only facility in the game is a space yard which also acts as a resupply depot. It also takes one turn to build on a new colony, so there is a two one turn lag before you can start prodicing more ships.
According to my memory you got one army per country, and that was the easiest thing to setup with an SE4 mod anyway, so that's what I went with.
I considered the warp points over the planets. The main reason I went with what I did was that I wanted the mod to be useable with randomly generated maps as well as the pre-made risk map, and I knew of no way to make the warp points do that in a randomly generated map.