Welcome fellow scientists and technology lovers!

So you decided that the only way for humanity to survive is using its brainpower to adapt to this harsh environment. Let me quickly outline some of the differences you will encounter during your stay on Pandora, and give you some hints right away:

- You have brought your favourite ride. On Earth, you used it when you needed food from the store, before returning back to the lab, this made sense to you then, but everybody else seems to have brought weapons instead. The speed and visibility advantage should be used to explore any ruins, to collect resources, by driving onto high places (mountains or observatories), this is your main form of income right now!

- There are some scary looking, native lifeforms, the size of your town - in the air, on land and in the sea, right next to you. Don't even think about anything funny, do not annoy them by scratching their backs with your petty bullets

- Your only colonist, by habit, ran off into the lab, so your building queue is showing huge numbers. Ignore his whining and reassing him as a worker for now(Production)

- Your exploration should yield you enough information about nearby resources, terrain features and so on, beeing smart as you are, you use the mental power of visualization to plant 1-2 cities at key locations, that are not far away from each other, while grabbing either Observatories or the resources you have a deficit for, as well as giving good territorial protection There is no point risking your buttocks such a beautyfull mind, to grab a food resource if you are in a swamp (with tiles giving +2 food) or surrounded by water(+2 food). Remember, this is a hostile planet with humans on it (most dangerous killers in history)

- Keep in mind that disproportional expansion or advances in economy/population will annoy your fellow humans, they start to feel threatened and discouraged, having a smart AND rich/powerfull guy nearby

- Comparing available research techs, with the richness(read: poorness) of your soil, you may want to research civic techs and other stuff - Do not give in to your emotions, be rational and research armor, defense and bunkers instead, or your ATV will get eaten (disregard the crew, you forgot your favourite lab coat inside)! And then your city will get eaten next!

At this point you should have a good idea about your situation and we can move on, to look at some details.

So lets have another look at who we are, to decide which strategy may be used. We get following faction bonuses:
Resourceful -50% Refit Cost
Curious - Adaptive Dynamics Tech and free Seeker ATV at start
Scientific +50% Research bonus from Scientists
Free-Spirited -2 Morale

Military:
- Having a small, sophisticated, army progressing through the play by refitting them with new tech instead of quickly building on demand(Solar empire), or spamming (DA, Solar Empire). The advantage is lower upkeep cost, but a hard time defending against diversified enemies or zergs.

- To workaround our disadvantages we should choose a nemesis unit class (e.g. Mechanized), then use technologies, formers and city location to adapt our environment in a way to mess up the nemesis' bonuses

- It is a good idea to use weapons with neutral or small specialization against other units, otherwise we will have to build more troops, this may change depending on your adversaries' troop composition

- always keep an eye on what troops the others are building, as well as their deplomatic standing towards you, if you see a lot of troops moving around your borders - adapt (remember, we have a refit bonus)

City building/Economy:
- City placement should keep in mind the military situation and our nemessis unit. E.g - by placing cities next to mountains on one hand, and sea on another, while filling adjacent tiles with forests, or fungus. A good idea may be to build fortresses at key locations, on mountains and have a former stay there for the visibility bonus. If you want to grab multiple resources, plant cities in not farther than 3 tiles away, with focusing on observatories or food.

- Morale penalty(aka lazyness and the drive to over-automate trivial tasks) leads to reduced efficiency if we don't keep track of pollution and morale in cities. Actually i ignore morale and reduce taxes if neccessary, the implications seem to be low, unless the penalty gets to big. This is definitely NOT worth using tiles around the city for specific improvements.

- Using colonist reassigning and locking should be used to specialize cities. The only situations where you should generalize building and production is when you either don't care any more or when there is no other way of getting out of negative resource gathering. City buildings cost maintanence - building everything everywhere is a good way to harm research, refitting ability and diplomatic options.

- The scientific bonus can be enhanced with observatories and buildings/tech to get huge modifieres, it may make sense to build research-only cities

- Specialized cities will need a lot of money and food from other cities, but this will be at least partially offset by having a small military

Science:
For now i have found only two research strategies which let me survive very high aggression on a small to medium map. I will outline the general ideas - due to the randomized tech tree you should adapt them to your situation:

Prereqs: you found some food and minerals and your city will probably survive on its own resources for a while, without building improvements on tiles. Colonization Frevor, Field Training can be grabbed quickly, while Tanks and Laz0rs are far away in the tree. You decide to rush-expand and then hold cities until tanks, without using formers.
1. Focus on getting all the ATV slots filled with defensive tech, as well as building city fortifications first. You want an ATV to survive any one attack of any native alien at this point. If the techtree is lucky, you will want to skip the level 1 armor and go straight for level 2.
2. Build 2-3 ATVs with armor and defensive devices. Research Field Training, build 1-3 operations.
3. Research Colonization Frevor, get a settler and a grunt. If no huge aliens are closer than 5 tiles away(2 steps until they reach you, depending on terrain) use all the operations on the units, this should yield level 5-7 and let them heal.
4. Go get your second city, with an escort of 1-2 ATVs and the grunts. If you encounter heavy resistance, suicide the grunts first, to weaken big aliens.
5. Depending on saved up money and location you may want to grab a third city right away, after building fortifications in the second.
6. Once your cities are secured by 1-2 ATVs, you want to either offset your resource income by civic techs or go straight for Tanks.
7. Once you have Tanks, start securing your territory, by wiping out close hives and start to build formers. Your attention shifts to grow cities as large as you can, quickly and planting research buildings everywhere, while building forests around adjacent tiles to your cities. Tanks with laz0rs will be your main weapon until ♥♥♥♥ hits the fan from now on. Have at least one city that is specialized in production of tanks by 1123~1124 AD, build some kind of military training facility. Build roads and Fortresses(you will soon know why you don't want all units to camp in one location)
8. The main idea is to have unrivaled units using pre-emptive strike, that can hold cities indefinetely. Due to good terrain and fungus as resource income in cities, they can produce competitive research with all improvements around them destroyed until you either get your nukes and drop-pods for offensive-capability, or out-research everybody to the point where you get titans (400+ power with healing device or nano repair is pretty epic), or Black Hole devices. So far i have yet to get a research victory with very high alien aggression - there is simply no time for it - or the enemies wipe themselves out before that, which leaves you with military or economic victories.

Like plan A, but focusing on offense using drop-pods to counter rush Messari portals. Will follow soon.

An unsorted (yet) list of tactics i found usefull:

Fungus: When i started off, Fungus techs were highly underrated. They have a lot of advantages:
- When all the 3 fungus techs are researched (each of them located in their own technological era) a fungus will give you +4 Food/Minerals for only 1 Pollution.
- Building them at adjacent tiles will give attacking mechanized ground units an attack penalty as well as reducing their movement to 1.
- The only way to remove them is using a former (plenty of time to shoot it), while other improvements can be destroyed by units
- Units passing through them are damaged
- You can build fungus on unsafe territory, on the farthest tiles or even accross a lake and get resources

Formers for city defense:
- Moving them into a city will grant you one wasted enemy turn, this may help if you have reinforcements on their way
- using some cheap armor and a visibility device, you can send them off to build a fortress on a mountain and keep them there for area surveillance. The armor and the fortress defensive bonus should be enough to keep a single native alien from destroying the former.
- The AI loves them, so you can use them as a destraction while moving vulnerable troops (needs some further testing, does not work sometimes)

Early Game:
- Flamers seem to be an epic way to defend against native aliens, due to the huge bonus
- ATVs get a bonus against zergling aliens on the ground, due to being mechanical. They have 3 movement and can mount laser weapons, which are not mountable by ground troops. This makes them a good general-purpose unit for defending infrastructure.

Thanks for reading this far. This is my first guide, so please let me know if i can improve it or if you want me to elaborate on some specific part of the guide.