For a ss player to have a good round you must be very focused and active during SOR and expo.

I tend to go with a +40% income with little or no research. Many will moan at that but thats their choice, for me it worked very well. Wardancers can also be effective for this.

For your intial builds at SOR dont go crazy on cf's. Remember the market will crash and remain so for the first 2-3 days. 7 Ref 10 farms (trust me on that one, so many forget farms that price rises nice during day 2-4) 15 cfs and 25 mines. Not exact figures there but not a kick in the nutz off.

Now you probably will have 0 end left, if you have none dont waste time trying to buy it. If you have any end left use it each tick to build more mines as you get about 200-400 gc from your pop. Once you have done all you possibly can without touching the market, get a very good sleep as from tick 12 onwards you are going to be busy.

The trick now to ensure a rapid growth (and I know this as I have on several occasions grown quicker than an attacker/banker team by end of first week) is to plan ahead. Work the figures, at what point will you be making more gc than you can use? Or at what point will you have more iron than your gc can use. Plan it in. If in 12 ticks your income and iron production will be sufficient to make 10 cfs but you have only enough end to build 7, make a point of building those ref at that point so as you have no delay in your growth. You plan ahead and plan it in around work and sleep times you will be very close to the top players.

Tick 15 start using the market CAREFULLY. Sell only what you can sell and dont rely on buy bids. Just sell what you can to maximise your building. Oh and store your food up, prices will hit atleast 1gc by tick 36 making your farms worth about 100gc a tick each.

Dont focus on one resource, keep it balanced until the market crashes, then you can focus on cf's as you can buy very cheap resources and boom your econ.

Keep going like that until market prices stabalize, and if you want build some Occults around tick 36 as that tends to go through the roof around tick 48. When market stabalizes properly you now want to be focusing on resource production with just enough cf production to cover your upkeep. Resources like iron tend to stablize at around 14-16gc and end maybe 16-18 both of which is well above the 12.8gc a rev can make without rc. Keep going like that and you will do well but always ensure you have just enough cf production to meet your upkeep as market closures happen and being ss you dont want to rely on your family. Learn to play the market to supplement your income. 300k is easily attainable from the market mid round.

Fleet, by tick 36 you will want to be building 2-5 trannies and 10 driods. Forget about bombers and figs. Grab what planets you can to keep cores clean and help your growth, never pick off a nearby big threat as it will be disaterous. Day 4 get yourself around 50-100 bombers and keep up the good work. As ss player you will be the first one attacking if you do the econ correctly. I have many times been attacking by day 4 whilst the family is another 4 days behind but thats also due to the security my early core cleaning offered.

When you build fleet, avoid doing what alot of the so called great (noobs) do and build 100-500 figs and driods in the first week. Seriously how many portals are you going to hit in the first 7 days, sometimes even 14 days. I tend to go for 250 bombers and around 50 driods/figs giving me upto around 5 fleets at any given time unless you need to hit more lasers.

Ok well I have said enough so hope some of that helps.