First, part of the whole intent of Aurora was to make it difficult to do the balancing act. Steve wanted players to be making difficult tradeoffs all the time.
Second, that being said, I think many if not most players use SM-mode to bump up the initial HW minerals by an order of magnituded. I resisted this for a long time in my games, but eventually I got tired of always having to deal with a Duranium crash. If you don't do this, then the initial game is essentially a race to build enough automines and cargo capacity to be able to get off-world mines into a position where they can take over the Duranium (and sometimes Sorium or Neutronium or Mercassium) low when Earth goes dry. Note that this might have changed some, since I saw in the release notes that Steve is now scaling the HW minerals by the population size.
For further info, you might try searching the boards for ancient posts (assuming they survived). I know this was a big topic of discussion a few years ago (3? 4?), but don't remember where the posts would be. I have a vague recollection of using the word "crash" in one of my posts in one of those threads, so that might be a place to start.
One more tip - in a conventional start, get a colony running on Mars (or equivalent if you don't start in Sol) ASAP. Even if Mars doesn't have minerals, the wealth flow from shipping colonists there is important, plus the civie's profits are used to build up your civie shipping capacity. I'm a little in trouble in my current game because the civies haven't yet taken off like they should.
John