moving quickly through turns

 Trade techs away that arent all that important like sensors or anything you want

Also i usually will lower production and military sliders to 10% and boost research to 80 when everythings built to 90 and social to zero or any combination thereof. I only do this with a positive economy

You could also do funny stuff like pay someone to attack someone and stuff

When my research slider is at 100% I will click-click the "Turn" button a lot.   Or, if I'm at <-500bc treasury and 0% tax, to grow Super Breeder, as I'm just now discovering.

But if my Social/Miltary sliders are turned on, usually I will go through my planets and focus production to eliminate any waste.  It's a lot of micro, but I want to play my best game.   Of course if the game's already won and I'm in mop-up phase, I might not be so detail-oriented.

If you click on the options tab and pull up the governor's menu, (the screen where you set rally points and build commands), you should see an toggle button to activate Spider Solitaire.  During the weeks where your growing empire is in a downtime, or when you are on hold with the Drengin forever, you can play this game to pass the time.  Just kidding about that one.

You can turn tech speed up.  That will help.

Or spell words in space with your ships, a classic.

The first 50 turns or so seem like a click-fest.  You have few worlds, economy is tight, and there are not many ships to pilot.  It does take a while to build up a good infrastructure.  However, after a while the game begins to slow down considerably.  You have to check the AI's ships positions, constantly check production, manuver your ships to strategic points (offensive or defensive.)  and finally, ensure that all your planets have a good balance between economic, research, and manufacturing aspects.  On larger maps, I can easily spend 5 to 10 minutes checking and re-checking my strategy to make sure it is still working before I hit the "Turn" button.

If you want to slow things down in the beginning...I never ever ever use the Auto-Explore option on my scouts so I can find all the juicy planets in range first.  This will help you a lot at the start of the game and keep you from clicking <Turn> so much.

Certainly there will be times when there's not much to do but I hate to click end turn without making sure there's absolutely nothing more that can be done in that particular turn and if I find myself clicking too quickly I stop and think about what it is I'm trying to accomplish and make sure that I'm doing all that I can. Basically things like adjusting my taxes each turn to make sure my approval on the bulk of my planets is precisely where I want it (usually 100% or 40% dependent on when in the game). Also each turn I'll tweak the balance between research and military (or social) spending so that I don't waste money at the end of a tech or to balance the number of turns to finish the tech and a ship (or building).

Also like someone pointed out trade those techs for something valuable *before* the AI researches them itself. The usefulness of those early techs expires quickly. You can always see what an AI is researching in the Misc section under the Stats tab of the Foreign Policy screen. I like to trade a tech to an AI the turn before they would finish researching it themselves, they'll still give you normal value for it but one turn later it would be valueless.

Basically each turn is an opportunity to accomplish one step towards your goal. I get antsy if I take too many steps without making obvious progress. However with that said there *will* be times when all you can do is click end turn, just when you do you should make *sure* that there's not more you could be doing.

Great point, I'll spend some of my downtime going over the AIs research from now on and take advantage of this.

oh and make some more survey ships<lots more>. By now most of the Ai's are destroyed and you have free reign since they dont seem to rebuild em..just give them the survey module,engines,life support as much as possible

On the map size I'm on now everything was uncovered pretty quickly.  At what map sizes does it make sense to build more survey ships?

Small.   Anomalies still spawn after the initial fun is over.  It's just a matter of when.

Up at Large, it makes sense to build Galactic Guide Book, and then rather than build extra survey ships, you can just slap on a free survey module onto every ship with some extra space.   That means every constructor, every troop transport, every trader.  Or you can build a bunch of little 25bc scouts.