@[ffc]: To summarize what I do at the beginning, I was of the mindset that metal was useless if you couldn't spend it. Since you need both metal and energy equal to the amount of buildpower that you want to use, and since excess energy could always be spent overdriving mexes, I adopted a policy of always trying to have more buildpower than metal income, and always trying to have more energy income than buildpower.

For my starting strategy, I decided to try to focus on building up lines of wind turbines to link mexes together, so that, as I claim mexes, I'll have enough energy to put them to use without excessing. That, and the mexes would be equally overdriven when given excess energy.