I can't answer exactly, but the Metaverse really only shows your best game. The game number is the sequential number of the game in which you got the highest score. What happens if you rank according to average score?
I'll leave it to others to answer the technical details, but the answer to your question is that your planets are spending all the money whether you are building anything or not. Try changing a few planets to building battleships or whatever, and you'll see that your spending doesn't change. There has been some discussion as to whether this is realistic, but the story is that your factories take all the spending to upkeep, whether they are cranking stuff out or not.
Another thing I do with transports is combine combat transports with regular in the same fleet. If you come in with a LOT more troops than they have, you will have minimal losses. Then the lost ships will only be 1-2 wussy transports, instead of losing your combat transports. This approach will slow you down a bit, since you can't spread out your invasion fleets by quite as much. But you also don't lose near as much precious population in your invasions. You can always unload more troops on
I've found that most of the time, the terror star gets the same movement points as whatever other ships you put in its fleet. I suppose this is a bug. And sometimes, if you pick the terror star and move it, the other ships in the fleet seem to be taken along for the ride. Then you can launch the other ships from the terror star (with full movement points available). However, terror stars are no good at killing ships, which is pretty irritating. But the cultural strategy works great,
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