There is still that last star to get on "tough" ;)
Glad you enjoyed it! The full version will deliver something to help with the missing fourth "X" (though not the classical empire vs empire battle, something more akin to tower defense where you have to protect from outside threats), along with a host of other stuff that just wouldn't fit into a PICO-8 cartridge (no matter how hard I pushed).
Seriously how did you do that? I played like 50 runs and the best I ever got was two stars on reasonable. :o
I now managed to get up to almost 7000. What I missed was that a planet can be oversupplied (in addition to their basic needs) to increase it's production, income and happiness. This gives you much more stuff the work with. This was in the guide actually, I just didn't get it first because there is no visual feedback that prompts you to give them extra resources (unlike the goods icon the appear next to satisfied hive worlds for example)
That was a big game changer for me too! And prosperous and rich world seems to count a lot in score (plus the fact that you have high happiness), though the highest cashflow gap is between unstatisfied and satisfied world, you better take care of each world you colonize!
On a side note, I've never seen prosperous or rich tourism/luwury world (because they don't supply anything). I tend to rely on them a lot at first, but after it seems that going for oversupplied worlds gave me good amount of money and happiness, plus I still had more resources to connect to other world that way...
Can't resist to publish that pic... Didn't even need fancy tech as infraspace or starbirth... I'll stop playing now ('til PC version!)
