He's talking about this, something I found out also, and will choose to share.
What he doesn't realise is that this post was re: new rounds, not this late *unless this is early still*
Start, Vote ONCE, build a large quantity of the cheapest ships you can - 25mill should do about 15k ships.
Go onto the rankings page, and prey on all the people in your range, start at the lowest there and work your way up. You can end up at ranking 500 or so, and have about 15k space, and to boot, you might find the odd person who was going really well, then did something bad and everyone *cough* we know which alliance *cough* went and bombed them back to the stone age. In a lot of cases, because they have been left alone, they've left the game, and the workers have been 'propagating' So they are a wealth of credits/workers *5 raids on one netted me 100 mill credits and 250 mill workers, quite nice if I do say so*
2k turns later, I have 14290 space, 200+million in credits, 400 million workers, Is that not a better way to start than spending 2k on extending your ship?
only one problem... with the new battle system its not so easy to do this
but with the old one that was a good idea i spose... you could just click on people with no ships and board and attack and stuff...