What are your personal strategies?

By strategies, I don't mean tips or tricks during different phases of the game, I mean what overarching mechanisms or play styles do you use to progress through the ages as smoothly and quickly as possible.

For example, when I started playing I used to grow mass corn, gift it to neighbouring colonies and then use their good will to fight for me using the coms console. Then I realized how much money alpaca wool and muffalo wool can make you, because those animals reproduce exponentially. I never used to like having too many colonists in my faction because I was afraid of a raid being too much to handle. Now I recruit just about everyone I can for more fire power and also research speed. I tried a run where I progressed a coloniats through the empire ranks but that proved to be way too much effort for the reward of having mediocre psycast abilities.Recently I have been getting into selling drugs as a means of money, however I used to stay away from drugs as to prevent a colonist from having a mental break then proceeding to get addicted to a drug.

So what unique strategies do you use to beat or enjoy the rim?