I’m now up to nine planets and two reasonably developed local farms in 
NB I don’t intend to post too much on
I’ve come up with the strategy of assigning developmental roles to each of my planets, as below:
I’m not sure if this is the most efficient strategy for maximizing mining returns or churning out ships in the most efficient time-frame, but it does suit my own particular psychological disposition (I like blocking out the day into ‘zones’ when I’ll be doing particular tasks) and it allows for a balanced development of mines/ ships/ skills.
As a strategy it also fits in quite nicely with the 8 hours to 5 days it can take for some of the buildings and skills to upgrade, and it makes me think twice about using transporters: why waste precious explorer spots by having transporters flying around everywhere when you can just wait an extra few hours?
Home planet Alpha
I wrote about my ‘Mission Control First’ strategy last week and Alpha is where this happens.
My limiting factor here is that I must have enough resources in place to be able to click the MC upgrade as soon as I get the opportunity.
To this end, I’ve been trying to keep my depots upgraded – to get to L09 I needed L15 (out of 20) depts to store enough resources, all nearly maxed out, to upgrade from L08.
It now takes about 3 days for these depots to fill up with my current level of mine development on Alpha, so it’s VERY handy that I’ve now got two local farms which have their mines developed to around L10 to feed into my development – otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do a full round of depot upgrades and be ready for the MC upgrade in the five days it takes between upgrades.
I’ve got a fleet of around 20 transporters which I’m using to collect resources from my local farms. TBH I need a few more to make sure I max out, their coal mines have a habit of maxing out before I can get to them if I alternate: what a waste!
I’ve actually taken in enough to be able to redistribute some to a couple of my other planets!
NB in terms of mines Alpha is my most developed – L15+, with a L17 uranium mine.
Beta, Gamma and Delta
Note how far away Beta is from Alpha – it took me a month to find that, then Gamma straight away after, and then Delta about another two weeks after that.
These have ended up being my ship-production planets – They all have mines around the L14-15 level – with Beta I focus on transporters, Delta is pure explorers and Gamma (for some reason) has become my second ‘big storage planet’ – and I’m using this to upgrade my ship skills. Don’t actually have a shipyard on this one.
Epsilon and Zeta
Planets 5 and 6 currently have mines developed to around L12 and I’ve got shipyards on both. I build some ships on these, and I’m actually still developing the mines – about 50-50 focus on each ATM.
I’m also going to make sure I use these resources to upgrade the ‘% increase skill’ for production – quite important me thinks!
Eta and Theta
My newest planets – these are all about the mines! I also use these as bases for exploration – I stack the explorers on my inner planets and then do a mass deploy when I find new planets.
New planet Iota
I produced my map a couple of days ago, but since then I've found a ninth planet - so I'll soon have to re-assign all of the above roles, for now this is just mines, mines, mines.
Further thoughts
It’s taking at least 30 mins a day to keep up with building and exploring, and at some point I'm going to have to reign this in, or maybe bots are going to be a necessary part of the game? I can't imagine how one could manage 50 planets effectively?!?
I haven't had any luck with landing any decent Rare planets yet - I have an uncommon and a rare, but they're both atmospheres, but an atmosphere planet counts for squat ATW. I guess that may change in the future?
I think I've been ridiculously lucky in ending up on the inner edge - there's about 150 squares of space between me and Earth, and presumably that on the other side to the next lot of settlers in this halo. That's a long way for people to come and attack me.
Also, I'm the biggest fish within at least 100 squares going any other direction, and that's unlikely to change now I've got the upper hand.
No one's attacking me yet - again, just lucky! Although when they do, I think they're in for a disappointing time, I've been steadily developing my defences along the way!
All this development will eventually be for the good of the 
Now, I guess I should figure out what to call my damn planets?