Advice from experienced players?

1. Start fine-tuning your sliders
2. Don't be afraid to max out your production and run at a slight loss early in the game
3. Rush to a Trade Good (Diplomatic Translators is easy) and sell it to other races on a payment plan. This helps you and hurts them. Then Rush to the next Trade Good and repeat.

I play a Tiny map with all races Intelligent and I consistently outproduce the AI. But you have to work the sliders to avoid waste.

Maybe it's just me, but it took me awhile to even understand the sliders. Now I look back and I'm not sure.

I never thought of selling tech on the payment plan, that's a great idea. Especially since I'm usually ahead on tech early on, only to get my butt handed to me later when those around me realize I have very little defenses.

thongor is right. My typical start (on large or larger, on normal and lower you need a quick colony rush rather than a sustained one) is to:

1) turn the taxes up as high as you can keeping morale at 100% (80% later). I used to suggest 80% from the get-go, but early on you need the pop growth that 100% morale gets you.

2) turn social spending down to 0% I usually keep miltary and research balanced early on, because there are places in the tech tree I want to reach before any of the AIs do.

3) turn funding all the way up to 100%

4) buy outright (no per-turn cost) a scout, and then start cranking out colony ships.

I'll keep this up until I reach a trade good that I want, where I change my allocation to 34/33/33, or my treasury will go negative next turn, at which point I reduce funding to achieve a balance with a small positive change each turn.

I recommend searching out the other civs and estabishing trade (both trade routes and tech/gooods) ASAP. Once I reach the point that I've got trade going with most of the AIs, I can usually manage to keep my funding at 100%. Don't know how 1.03 is going to affect this, though, I'm still early on in my first 1.03 game.

This is great advice. Also, did Frogman change the AI so that it didn't cheat and know where all the yellow stars were at start? I find this gives us a huge disadvantage (giving the AI the ability to know where to colonize without having to explore).

Note: I play on Tiny maps, so I don't need scouts. I use the starting ship to make contact with everyone, especially the "Minor" races and their hyper economies. They are the biggest threat to beat you to trade goods.

I try not to rush build things early on in order to save cash so that I can max my per-turn spending even if it is a deficit. After I start milking the AIs for cash, I might rush-buy a trade good but only to prevent them from getting it.

Look at how much it costs to rush-buy anything vs. building it. There is a huge difference and there's no point in fine-tuning your sliders if you are going to throw all of your BC away on rush-buying. It's better to crank production to 100% for 3-4 turns and get it that way.

I don't think he has. It's not as bad as it sounds, once you get used to the game. While the AI is very good, you should still be able to outthink it, and if you follow this kind of pattern, you'll even be outproducing the AI early on on the easier difficulty levels.