That said, I'm not sure "dread rushing" is actually possible either. This brings up something that has been bothering me too: on the server I have been micromanaging the most, between my 4 colonies and 10 outposts I have maybe 500 RO. This is not enough to build anything big, even if I did research up to capital ships. I am stuck building lesser ships that are useless.
Meanwhile, in my other game, I have barely done anything beyond setting up one colony and a couple of outposts, and I have something like 7k RO. Granted, I am a Trader in this game, and I have a jovian planet next to my home sector, but is that really enough of a difference to justify over an order of magnitude difference in RO production? I feel like the first game is already lost for me, since I don't have the RO production to sustain the higher end techs (despite colonizing every RO generating world I've found, only to have them generate +1 or +2 with the colony inplace, WTF?). As a result I've hitched my wagon to the non-RO ships, which I now realize are worthless.