1) Instead of trying to find the planets, I make the planets come to me. No, seriously - when I start a new game, I set stars, planets, and habitable planets all to Abundant. With these settings, almost every single star will have habitable planets, and most of those will have at least one
good habitable planet.
I don't even bother with scouting. The flagship goes on a permanent survey mission until the anomalies are gone. Every time I crank out a colony ship, I just send it either blind to a new star system or to a planet I've already spotted.
2) I used to build colony ships normally and buy the first factory on each planet. That quit working at the higher difficulty levels. Now, playing at Crippling, I've found that the best thing to do is set my Military and Research sliders to 40% each, leaving the Social slider locked at 20%.
Then, depending on how much cash I have coming in, I purchase transports. Usually, I let a new transport spend a couple of turns in production, then buy the remainder, so I'm pumping out transports every three turns on my home planet. On the buy turn, I set the Military slider to zero, jumping research to 80% for those turns, then set it back to 40% to start the next transport going.
I also set my first few colonies to building transports in bigger galaxies, but I only buy and reset production based on my home planet. That one planet is more than enough micromanagement for me - I'm sure there are ways to improve on this with enough time and patience.
