Star Wars: Empire at War - Imperial Buildings

Star Wars: Empire at War - Imperial Buildings
This is a hint / guide for Star Wars: Empire at War. The index of all our guides for Empire at War is here.

During Tech Level 2 / Mission 4 (Subjugating Geonosis), many planets will be available for conquest, although only three (Eriadu, Geonosis, and Sullust) are initially under Rebel control.
At this time you may want to capture and fully develop the planets. Alternatively, you can blitz through the Rebel-controlled planets including Geonosis (ending the mission) and continue on to Mission 5 (Attack on Mon Calamari), which also opens up Tech Level 3.

Whether you quickly take Rebel space (it is not so important to secure the planet itself, just control space for each planet) makes a big difference to how you approach buildings on planets.

You can build fleets and large stations to protect planets, but this is irrelevant to the Rebellion as they can launch Raid Fleets. They small attack forces bypass a space blockade to try to take a planet directly. If they succeed, you lose your space station.
Therefore, if you end up on the defensive, you will be overstretched trying to garrison every planet against both space and ground invasion.

Instead, if you seize Rebel space quickly at the start of each mission, you can stop them from making Raid Fleets and later do ground assaults at your leisure. You only need a few strong fleets to make multiple space sieges quickly, and one large ground force with a diverse unit mix to choose from at your first Reinforcement Point.

In such a case, you need only two types of planets: Production and Credits.
For Production, choose planets with 7 or 8 building slots, and concentrate on one type of factory. Build multiple copies of the factory, as the final production time is divided by the number of appropriate factories you have (e.g., If you have 7 Advanced Factories, an AT-AT will take only 1/7th of the usual building time).

Once you have completed a building, it's prerequisite building can be destroyed. So, if you have eight slots, you can have 7 Advanced Factories -- Your build queue is Light Factory, Heavy Factory, sell Light Factory, Advanced Factory x 7.

Every other building slot on every other planet can be devoted to Mining Facilities. Having an excessive bank account means that when a new Tech Level is available, you can (hopefully) immediately queue space stations everywhere, allowing you to build better space units.

As a precaution, the key shipyards (those that can build Capital Ships) could be more heavily defended with full garrisons in space and on land, Shield Generators, Turbolasers, Hypervelocity Guns, and Magnapulse Cannons.