This is an excellent article in its own right, but I want to add: this is one of the very few grand strategy games I've played where you can keenly feel the difference between "I have the theoretical knowledge to build a thing," "I have the resources and industrial capacity to build the thing," and "I have the logistical network to support the thing in meaningful numbers." In one game, faced with a dwindling rare earth metal supply, I had to downgrade my tank designs to heavier and less efficient steel armor to ensure I could keep expanding my solar farms, which were my only source of power. In another, I tried to siege an enemy city with heavy artillery in the early game, only to find that I had neither the supply trucks nor the munitions factories to fire them more than once every five or six turns.
This is a game i've wanted to play for some time but my brain is simply too small to understand
It's a daunting one, but there are ways to keep the difficulty curve manageable. If you start on an Earthlike world, low number of rivals, lowest difficulty, enable Easy Logistics, you get breathing room while you work out the basics (you'll definitely want to keep the instructions open even then, though)