I will try and give some of my advice and experience from playing conventional starts, which I do most of the times.
There is no tool for figuring out your fuel situation other than looking at your ships and try to do an estimation of how much you will use based on the type of missions you will send your ships on. On the "Fuel Report" screen you get a nice overview of your ships maximum/current fuel status and their fuel efficiency. From here you can at least make a good judgement on how much fuel you are currently consuming. You can also look at your yearly fuel production and then watch your fuel reserves decrease or increase over the course of a year, this will obviously tell you if you use more than you make and then take action accordingly.
In regards to construction facilities this is highly tied with three different resources which are Minerals, Wealth and population. You must make sure you have all of them and balance them with everything else. When you look at minerals you need to look at Duranium since almost everything (except financial centres) will require 50% Duranium. So the mining of Duranium will usually set the maximum level of factories that you will use. You need to deduct the Duranium you intend to use for ship building, yard expansion and ship maintenance and what's left over can be used for factory construction. If you have a total of lets say 2000t of Duranium produced each year and you estimate about 300t per year for other things not produced in your factories you have 1700t Duranium left over, that is a maximum of 3400 build points worth of factories.
But in your case you will have to balance not only that but also wealth and population, you don't really have an abundance of either I would say. When it comes to population you will eventually hit that roof once you start building laboratories, naval yards, maintenance facilities etc...
My primary concern in the beginning of a conventional start game is to get my civilian economy going by building a colony on either Luna or Mars. In my current game I had a great Luna with large quantities of both Duranium and Corundium and decent accessibility so I choose Luna for my first colony.
You need nuclear thermal engines and at least one colony with some infrastructure on it before any civilian shipping starts building ships. You also need to research cryogenic transport so your civilian shipping lines can start shipping colonists to your newly established colonies. I usually rely on my civilians to build up my colonies, civilian shipping supply colonies with infrastructure and colonists without my worries. I don't like to waste Duranium resources on building infrastructure other than about 100 infrastructure to kick-start a colony.
I usually only like to use my own freighter for hauling minerals so I only build two small cargo ships in the early game for the purpose of helping out and deliver infrastructure to new colonies or hauling minerals where I have no mass-drivers. I suppose you know about civilian contracts and how you can tell your civilian ships to ship stuff between your planets.
One other important thing that you need is to build at least one troop transport ship and some military structure or small ship after you built your first colony. Quite soon that colony will start require military presence. For military I usually go with a corvette type ship armed with some sort of beam weapon. I like to go with lasers because they will give you a good multi-purpose role with a low amount of research. I worry about missile technology for later. The first ships are mainly more like a coast guard than real military ships and laser armed ships are pretty cheap, both to build and maintain.
When it comes to laboratories I give a very high priority to them once I have built one Academy, one Sector Command and one Commercial Shipyard. After this I will priorities at least 20 laboratories with about 25-50% of my industrial capacity. After this I lower the build rate of laboratories to about 10% of my industrial base and leave it at that throughout the game, more or less (if resources permit it). 20 laboratories make sure I can give at least 2 labs to every field and have four additional to concentrate research in more important areas as the current situation warrant. If I'm really pressed I will remove one lab from a low priority research field (but never lower than one) and concentrate even further in some field.
Here is list of research I do in a prioritized order for a conventional start...
Geological Survey Sensors (Sensor tech)
Pressurised Water Reactor (Propulsion tech)
Nuclear Thermal Engine (Propulsion tech)
Duranium Armour (Defensive tech)
Cargo Handling Systems (Logistics tech)
Sector Command (Logistics tech, can be skipped if you are really pressed for research points!)
Cryogenic Transport (Logistics tech)
Garrison Battalion (Logistics tech)
Troop Transport Bay (Logistics tech)
Active Grav Sensor Strength 10 (Sensor tech)
Infra-red Laser (Energy tech)
10cm Laser Focal Size (Energy tech)
Capacitor Recharge Rate 2 (Propulsion tech)
Fire Control Speed rating 1250km/s (Sensor tech)
Beam Fire Control Range 10000km (Sensor tech)
Fuel - I see. I never had trouble dealing with fuel before, I always kept it on a steady rise and good to know I did it the right way (the game has many hidden extra tools that you discover via experience or advice). A good thing I do is try to do a hub system where the main bulk is always on Earth with some emergency small refineries on the colonies. And I build from the in out. Never failed me though it makes it a bit more logistically intensive.
Yes, I agree. As I did the players the choice and as there is almost nothing on Luna (though the ground survey found a large deposit of Neutronium) I went for Mars first (now considering Luna a second target together with sending Humans to Jupiter’s moon).
I am aware of the way colony works (I am always a bit forward as I rarely post everything in a day. At this point there is infrastructure being hauled to Mars, I have Iceman colony ship being designed (researched the cryogenic bay) and all is going well. Once the ship is build manned mines and humans will start to be shipped to Mars. So that part is OK
The troops transport thing is new for me however though I know I need to get some protection sooner rather than later. But I had no idea battalions provided Defence rating for colonies? That is why in one of the last episodes (I think three more episodes ahead from part 16) I talked about getting some missile PDCs.
With the laser ships I am ok too though I gave my viewers some leniency of what they would like me to build.
The current stage I am in I already have 8 research labs and working hard to get more. 10% is given to factories while I plan to tone it down to 5% and give the 5% to refineries. Labs have 40% while 25%/25% are for mines (automated for Comas sola and one other I have marked in the video, manned for Mars). 20 labs sounds like a doable goal for me although I have no (!!!) larger deposits of Mercassium anywhere in the system
The research:Geological Survey Sensors (Sensor tech) - done
Pressurised Water Reactor (Propulsion tech) - done
Nuclear Thermal Engine (Propulsion tech) - done
Duranium Armour (Defensive tech) - done
Cargo Handling Systems (Logistics tech) – not done and not planning to although I will think about it
Sector Command (Logistics tech, can be skipped if you are really pressed for research points!) - not done and not planning to although I will think about it
Cryogenic Transport (Logistics tech) - done
Garrison Battalion (Logistics tech) – not done but I plan to do that one asap
Troop Transport Bay (Logistics tech) – not done but if battalions give defence I will mark it a priority with the Garrison Battalion
Active Grav Sensor Strength 10 (Sensor tech) – planning to
Infra-red Laser (Energy tech) – planning to
10cm Laser Focal Size (Energy tech) – planning to
Capacitor Recharge Rate 2 (Propulsion tech) - planning to
Fire Control Speed rating 1250km/s (Sensor tech) – planning to
Beam Fire Control Range 10000km (Sensor tech) – planning to
So regarding the research I am where you are. I also already got the thermal reduction done and I intent on doing all the basic engine techs soon to give me some more possibility of design to play with.
I even got a first civilian ship build though I haven’t asked it to do anything, I intend to do it after I explain everything to the new players. Any tips I should not miss?
BTW as you do conventional starts, do you have any templates for the starting beam ships? And I wanted to build fighters (never did that before) but every time I try to the ship is just marked as a vessel. What am I missing?