A lot of people talk about waiting to explore or build a military until Ion drives or MP. Which makes sense, because you probably want at least the 10k Construction techs researched before going for the approx 15k worth of techs needed to get jump drives and surveying.
But I like to get geo survey done early, so the civilians can start popping mines for me.
I made a mistake in my last start. Get cargo handling before you get the civilian economy going. As a result of not doing that, I have a lot of civilian ships without cargo handling. They are fine for longer haul, I suppose, but it is still a bit inconvenient.
My theory is to be as cheap as possible in terms of the necessary techs to get started on surveying. Boat bays instead of going all the way to hangars. I would feel differently if I had a decent Logistics scientist.
So small engineering bay, which is vital to my scouting pinnace strategy. Efficiency 5 jump engines, so I can have a 250 ton pinnace design, and a 500 ton EM sensor equipped longer endurance version.
Then I shift almost completely to construction techs, (and improved command and control), to improve my economy. So I will be exploring on a shoestring, scouting carefully, dropping 15 ton Long Watch satellites (50 year endurance) at all jump points, because my Grav survey ships are actually carriers. Theory is I want a cheap jump point watch that doesn't take much room to store. And microfighters compare well to sensor missiles, and don't require launcher overhead in terms of how many you can carry.
Theory is to build somewhat more carriers than I have grav sensor pods to put in them, and just cycle the carriers in for maintenance and shore leave when a new carrier comes available to take the survey pods.
While I am researching construction techs up to the 20k or 40k level, I have scientists in all the major categories with 1 research lab, to try and get their skills up.
My long term plans is have a continually expanding civilian ship yard to get to very large size, to eventually build Terraforming Module ships, either making them engineless and also build a large tug design, or cheese it with two small tugs in a tractor chain. Once I have a large enough Terraforming fleet, I can switch it over to making asteroid mining ships, I suppose. Because there will be extrasolar high availability rocks that won't ever become civilian mining complexes.
Last game, I wanted to have missile sensor buoys at all jump points, but the tech available for that was so much after my survey techs that I had 40 systems scouted before I started. This way, I can put the long endurance 'fighters' in the leftover space in the boat bays and later hangars. And I know the grav survey ships are going to be going through every jump point I encounter eventually, so they make a great candidate.
This also meant that I could build a couple fighter factories early, and pre-build a large number of Long Watch satellites, keeping them employed until I got the techs to build grav survey pods and pinnaces with my fighter factories.
So that is my conventional start tech theory, what are your approaches?