Ok, so first update.
We took to the skies, oh god those skies, they are a painful, poor and humbling place.
We start with me, the Terrans. We are good diplomats, we extort other civs for stuff. Om nom nom.
The Galaxy is frikken huge.
So, I happily expand, evading serious economic crashes, I colonise Mars (cause its awesome and stuff) and proceed to designate it as my research capital for a while. I find some high value planets near by in Eula and another system to my galactic east (hee hee), I colonise them. Things are going fine.
Then suddenly I find a minor race inhabiting a system close by, they appear human. They are called the Letzlandians (not entirely sure if thats a pun or not), and then seem to like research weapons. So, me being good' ol' humans, I trade them a bunch of crappy colony techs for their vastly superior weapons.
I now have missiles and good point defence and armor. They have technology they can't use.
To my Galactic South there is the Altarian Resistance, a curious species that looks exactly like humans. We must find out why!
Anyhoo, we're having a fight. Not so much a bang bang pew pew fight, more a fight over the hearts and minds of people. Theres this one system, called Vega right. It's borders have changed so much over the last 3 years I'm still not sure its ever going to settle down.
For the above, I've kinda went overboard in trying to get cultural dominance there, placing two culture space stations, one of them at the peak of what my technology can offer
Economicly our empire has been doing well, we've kept up with other civilisations quite well, and I'm expanding my trade routes around the galaxy.
I made the small mistake of entirely relying on ancient tomb ships and their expensives wares to support 3 colonies, it made a tiny crash in the economy a while back but its ok now.