Re: sectors. I've been rotating every sector in my empire between industrial, tech, and energy production whenever I remember to. I give new sectors huge resource grants and don't tax them, then within about 10-20 years once I'm sure they can be self sufficient I move them up to max taxation. So far I have more energy and minerals than I know what to do with so it seems to be working.
I see a lot of complaints about hitting a point where you can't expand peaceably anymore in this thread... what comes after?
War.
Ah, so less CK-like and more 4x? Wants me some elaboration.
I've played for a little under 30 hours in my first game and colonized huge swathes of space. Still have more colonization to do. It mainly depends on how the early game goes; sometimes people get boxed in by larger powers, sometimes you break out and everything is good. Inevitably if enough time passes everything will be colonized and then it turns into EU4/ CK2.
So... how feature rich/barren is the post-colonization phase of the game?
I see a lot of complaints about hitting a point where you can't expand peaceably anymore in this thread... what comes after?
Also, mentions about AI sticking to their alliance/federation through thick and thin, despite things, sounds... bad.
It depends, really. You can start playing the game like EU where its all about interacting with other empires, mainly through conquering them. Sometimes crisis will happen (like the Unbidden everyone keeps talking about) but that's not a sure thing. Some of it feels a little half baked right now. Alliances and federations are a bit... off at the moment. Like they could use a little cleaning up and a few extra features before they're really going to start making the game more fun.
There's some fun internal stuff you can do with pops. You can genetically engineer them to be different, build robots to populate worlds, and do all kinds of stuff with migration/resettlement/enslavement/purges. The only real use of all this is to incrementally increase efficiency or to open up new worlds for colonization. Beyond that you can have fun role-playing the kind of civ you want to be.