So, I adjust mine based on minerals in Sol (or starting system if alien) and the first few jumps from my home system.
The first thing is I slam down colonies on anything thats got good mineral composition, or a massive amount of a specific mineral. The small stuff goes to the civilians as revenue. In particular, mass quantities of Duranium is a must, as thats a early chokepoint.
First order of industry; maintenance facilities, automated mines, mass drivers, construction factories, a massive glob of infrastructure, research. In that order. As colonies come on line, I add some spaceports, cargo shuttles, and terraforming (but only for bigger projects)
I build maintenance facilities until I have at least 20% more capacity than I do ships in orbit. Then I stop and move to the next project. I usually have 3 to 4 things in production, sometimes a bit more. Infrastructure, for example, is usually set for something like 10,000 units, but at 10% capacity. Ditto with construction factories, large numbers, low percentage, usually not more than 20% at most.
I go for a mix of 2/3rd naval to 1/3 commercial on shipyards. Like others, my first commercial builds are early freighters, fuel harvesters, and tankers.
As soon as my survey ships spot anything worthwhile, I slam a colony on it, have freighters ship a few hundred infrastructure over, and drop a seed crop of 20 to 50 thousand colonists on it. If its a border system, sensors go on them next. The reason for this is two fold. It gives me early warning for nasties inbound to my homeworld and it stakes a claim to the system if run into more reasonable NPRs who arent shooting at me. If you have colonists down, they arent going to claim the system. If they are, its time to get the warships updated and rolling out of the slips.
As far as colony prioritization;
1) Habitable worlds. Anything thats close to your normal species tolerances gets settled immediately. The pop grows naturally, and civilian lines will drag folks over frequently. Good place to drop financial centers!
2) Low cost colony worlds with minerals and terraforming potential. Pretty self explanatory, a 2.0ish colony cost with decent minerals and the potential for a fairly easy terraforming is an immediate colony candidate, especially if the system has lots of additional mineral sources.
3) Ruins. Doesnt matter how bad the planet sucks, its a colony. Might be small, but the benefits are too good to pass up.
4) Tactical These are locations that arent great, but you need a deep space listening post, or need to claim the system to keep an NPR from cutting off your Empire warp lines. These are usually small, but I try and get a good mix of stuff on there so they act as speed bumps and early warning in case of hostilities.
Once I get the basics dropped on a world, I stack all the extra stuff on civilian orders to build up additional civilian lines. I only change that if I need to get something there fast (mass drivers for example) and then I use my own freighters. Otherwise, the civs can do it.
In my current game, I am 19 years in, I have Sol and ten colonies. Two are habitable worlds, one of which was 1 jump from Sol and is at 28 million. 3 are frontier systems cutting off NPR access to my empire, one is a fortified major transit nexus, the others are all colony worlds, one of which is a moderate cost alien ruins location.
I am juggling infrastructure, mines, maintenance facilities, and deep space tracking stations for colonies. One shipyard just got done upgrading to the new terraformer design and is putting out 5 of them every batch. Another yard is building the newest fuel harvesters. The smallest is building two more diplomatic ships, since I just ran into an alien NPR that I dont have ship for, as the other two are talking to my trading partners.
With all of that going on, the civilians have built 29 freighters between the four transport companies and a couple of colony ships. My current cashflow is good, but the next big push is going to be financial centers to keep up with the population growth.
