Depends on starting position but generally about the 6th or so planet I start developing a trade network. 2 or 3 trade ports don't pay off very fast but 4 or more do. Especially when you get proper string of them.

Scrapping my cap factory is definitely an improvement I should be doing.

In addition to trying to build/upgrade everything you noted, I've also been researching my first two Terran population capacity as soon as I can: it increases HW income from 19.3/sec to 20.2/sec and then to 21.1/sec (+0.9 credits per sec for each upgrade) and costs 400/0/25 and 500/0/50 - for each, cost is less than half a trade port, but with about half the income (trade ports give what, 1.8+/sec?) I think those are giving me the most difficulty in getting trade ports up in addition to everything else... but the rate of return on pop upgrades seems a bit better than trade ports.

I'll practice a bit more and see what happens.

And yes, I'm on Faster everything, quick start.

Cobalts aren't a good choice for your first frigate units I think - your priority should be killing the siege frigates so your colony cap or colony frigate can colonize so that you can build a turret and move on ASAP. You should be building scouts instead.

Light frigates have a 75% damage modifier against siege frigates (light armor) - scouts have a 200% modifier.

I don't have much of a problem with the general how-to-expand strategy - it's that when I'm expanding as fast as I can I find I rarely or never have enough funds for trade ports until later in the game. I'm still experimenting though.

It depends on how many siege frigates there are, but yeah, you need a lot of scouts. 1 siege, send 3; ---- 2, send 7; ---- 3, send 11.

I used to hate building turrets as well. I justify it to myself now by saying: the choice is between a one-time cost of 250/75/35, and maybe being pushed back one more planet. If I get my capital ship to colonize, build a turret, and move to the enemy's front lines ASAP, and subsequently acquire one or two more planets than I would have otherwise, I think the investment in the turret would definitely be worth it.

That's only my opinion though.

The problem with strategy discussions like these is that game speed and map size completely dominate strategy...and people's intuition tends to be based on only the game speed and map size they are used too...

I would bet that most of the disagreement here is more from different game settings than actually different strategies...

The key difference between these strategies is speed.  Using scouts, you can clear the relevant militia units - namely Krosovs and Javelis - very quickly and set up your turret.  Once the Javelis/Krosovs are dead and the turret is down, you can leave to begin work on the next planet rather than clearing up.  That's the weakess of the frigate-based approach; you have to stay behind with your units to finish the clean-up job.  Although you save money by not building turrets, I'll end up earning that money and more because I was able to grab more planets more quickly.

As for the Arcova/Cobalt comparison, the cost ratio is about 2.5 Arcova to every one CObalt.  Damage-wise against a light-armored target it's 5.1 damage per Arcova to 7.125 per Cobalt.  This means on a direct pound-for-pound damage comparison against light targets Arcovas are 79% more effective than Cobalts. 

To put it another way, three cobalts will deal 21.375 damage per second to a light-armored target.  To get the same amount of damage out of Arcovas, you need only four of them, which costs significantly less than three cobalts.

Having a whole bunch of scouts in backup (not with your main battle fleet) (like 20 maybe) can be very useful in fighting off enemy siege frigate swarms, and for doing quick raids on enemy colony frigates you spot, and also for killing enemy anti-structure cruisers. They can be a bit useful against a few enemy LRF but will die very quickly if the enemy has any decent number of them.

He was asking "would that increase the efficiency of Cobalts to Arcovas?", which it definitely would (but the cost for the research would be much more than the benefit would be, at least early game)

Although I used to often queue 2 or 3 LF for just that purpose (killing the neutral LF at asteroids so the colony ship didn't have to retreat), I realized that by the time all the militia in that well have been cleared, the colony ship waiting in the previous well probably already has a lot of antimatter (often close to 140) - so there's less advantage to clearing everything out ahead of time. (start the order to warp in at 172-174 antimatter to colonize as soon as possible without the colony frigate wasting any time)

I noticed that too and found a solution. Usually the enemy militia will all focus fire on one of your scouts (or on two scouts, with the flak's other banks). If you send that scout to the opposite end of the gravity well after all the enemy siege frigates are dead, you'll be able to warp in your colony frigate (with enough AM) and have it colonize without taking any damage at all (and will be able to warp out with only minimal hull damage, if any). After it colonizes and warps out, order it to warp back in as soon as possible - if the turret has started building, then the neutral militia will priority target the turret first, and your colony frigate will be free to sit in the gravity well regenerating AM and shields in preparation for the next planet, while the turret takes care of the neutral militia.

Actually, now that I think about it, maybe you could have the colony frigate attack the LRM - that way you don't have to keep a couple of scouts behind to kill it! I haven't tried that before but I think it should work.

If you kill all the enemy siege frigates well before your colony frigate has enough antimatter, that's OK, just have all but one of your scouts go attack the next well, but keep one scout behind (probably have it retreat to the previous well) so it can warp in and lure the remaining militia to the other side of the well when the time is right.

So does the scout, but a single one for each LRM can still kill them before the LRMs destroy the turret.

The ratio of their performance remains the same.

Damage(Cobalt)/Damage(Arcova) == Damage(Cobalt)*1.1/Damage(Arcova)*1.1

Either way a single Cobalt deals 40% more damage than an Arcova.  However, a single cobalt costs 2.5 times more than an Arcova (give or take depending on your metal:credit conversion rate) so the Arcova ends up dealing 80% more damage on a cost-for-cost basis.

If you're willing to invest money in upgrades, you'll get the best value out of just unlocking the LRM and building that.  The 1st tier upgrades are very inexpensive, and on faster speed it's totally reasonable to pick up a few, but for TEC the armor and hull upgrades are probably your best bet.

A colony frigate is capable of fighting a scout or two.  Certainly it's low and not worth talking about in a major fight, but if we're talking 3 or 4 frigates duking it out over an asteroid field it adds up!

All right. I've been practicing, and still have not been able to have enough funds to build a trade port until at least 10 minutes in, if I'm colonizing everything in sight. Planet research, development costs, and extractors are just too much.

On my successful quick-expansion tries (which are extremely difficult for me to pull off perfectly), I was able to buy my first trade port at:

10 minutes / 5 planets (lots of metal, no crystal)

10 minutes / 6 planets (lots of crystal, no metal)

10 minutes / 5 planets (lots of metal, no crystal)

The limiting factor is usually crystal. Credits are never a problem.

I have two ideas to speed this up a bit:

(1) Sell more metal (if I see I'll have a surplus) and buy more crystal. At the moment, I'm always selling 200 metal at the very beginning of the game (at the peak price) and buying 100 crystal at its lowest point. But this is still not quite enough to get trade ports up ASAP.

Problem: selling resources at a discount and then buying resources at a markup results in a LOT of waste. Perhaps it'd be better just to wait another 4 minutes or so. Then again, what else would I be spending all my extra metal on? Or I could just buy a bit of crystal with my extra credits.

(2) Start completely skipping Volcano planets until a few trade ports are up, unless there are no other real sources of metal income. The cost of the first Volcano is 1600/375/300 (more than twice a trade port, after research) and at peak tax income is only worth about 1.6 trade ports, plus (usually unnecessary) metal income.

Another option is to restrict my colony frigate to only colonizing one planet initially (instead of 2), but I don't really like that idea much.

I'll try some of these and see what happens.

Oh, right, I haven't yet mentioned that a key part of my early-expansion strategy is that my capital (colony) is always moving in the general direction of the enemy, no matter what gravity wells are on the way - I rarely feel I have the time to take even a slight detour, even if it's through a planet with nice resources, unless there's only 1 siege frigate.

My reasoning is that side gravity wells can always be acquired later, but that if you don't grab that front-line planet near the enemy, it's lost to you semi-permanently until (if) you can build up a decent fleet and attack.

While this may lose me a moderate amount of potential income in the short run (and inhibit my resources to build trade ports), it might be worth it.

Maybe not?

In general I'd have to say I agree with you...the problem is people easily forget to go back and take those planets (just a couple of scouts often is all that's needed)...I myself do this sometimes and I really hate myself for it...

The trickiest dilemma is if you have a heavily fortified terran/desert on the side...scout tricks usually still work, but I really hate having to abuse the silly AI and have them fly in circles...