[Alneyan]

All below does not take cheesiness into account, and merely states what is possible to do that does not sound so obvious (it does not include anything involving abusing allies or the like).

3') Use fighters for your fleet training needs. They travel on their own, do not need a SY, and so can be built at that useless one facility planet without wasting SY-time. Fighters also do not cost anything at all to maintain, unlike ships.

12) Drones can have strategies of their own, including not automatically ramming anything within range. If you like to use them, it might be a good idea to use decoy drones to soak up PDC fire (especially if you would like to do something different for once).

13) Most actions involving Stellar Manipulation can be done in the middle of the turn. For example, send your Warp Opener to another system, and order the vessel to open a wormhole there. Or put a Star Destroy over a star, order it to pull back for one sector, and then to come back to the star to destroy it, giving your fleet time to escape. That one may be quite obvious, but I have played for several months before being told about it.

14) When playing with a harsh ship limit, and/or having resource shortages, you might want to put vessels in your queues, and hold their construction one turn before completion. It will cut down your resource expenses will still allowing you to have backups under your hand. (The answer to your question Alarikf is: yes, the Polymer People has such reinforcements standing by)

15) Not exactly a trick, but something worth reminding. When using Resource Converters, never put the planet on Repeat Orders. Ever. Failure to do so will result in headaches, massive economical shortages, and general despair within your Empire.

16) Much like Slick's first suggestion, you can use dummy units to mark planets fully developped. Make a satellite, put it in the queues of all your developped planets, and put the queue on hold. This way, you can sort planets by construction queue, allowing you to see which planets are currently doing nothing.

17) Are you bothered with having people spy on your ship count? (Namely by checking the numbers after your designs) You might want to consider doing a very minor retrofit then, where the original vessel is "This is not a warship" and the updated one "This is still not a warship". Once your ten "This is not a warship" warships have been retrofitted, the next such ships will not take the numbers after 11, but will cycle back to 1. Someone too confident might actually believe you have fewer ships than in actuality, as after all your design name remained the same.