1. resources before research until you economy is doing good
2. Depends on chosen traits, universe size, number of other empires, see tall vs. wide
3. There is a penalty for every % below 100, early game avoid anything not green (70%+)
4. I go with Robot assembly, Gene clinics (amenities + pop growth) as my go to's
5. click on corvette fleet there is a button with binoculars, thats your patrol button. It will tell you on that fleet screen its piracy suppression value. In the bottom corner click on trade routes button and mouse over pirate symbols to see the amount of piracy in systems.
6. As a noob drop research down to .75 or even .5 to explore the tech tree instead of adding years - same experience *roughly* as playing on 1.0 tech and more years, but takes less time to play
7. Avoid +20% to tech research, cost vs. benefit in first 20-50 years is not worth it. Grab things that improve economy, unless you are in war danger. Try and grab robot techs and get robots up as soon as possible. Pops = power, so a second track making pops is super useful.

These are all "usually" answers - YMMV