Firstly, I feel like I must be missing something with the Crew resource. I get that it's designed to act as another cap on your fleet size (which honestly seems a bit odd seeing as there's already metrics in the game to do that) but I'm finding it's hindering my ability to expand to the point of being unfun.

I've started a few new games now but each time I find that because Outposts cost 50 crew, and so do all the various mining stations etc (which I'm finding I basically have to totally avoid), I can either expand (very slowly) or build a fleet up. Even if I neglect my fleet completely I can't expand quickly enough to not be swamped by all my neighbours, which gives me not enough planets etc. to eventually fix the problem of lack of crew.

I build a naval academy (or whatever it's called) on Earth as soon as I can. It's nowhere near enough. Even building strongholds isn't enough (and doesn't feel like something I should be doing as Earth, but that's just my role-play centric mind at work)

And even doing all that I'm still left with build ships or expand (incredibly slowly).

The AI doesn't seem to be having the same problem - they seem to be expanding at a vanilla Stellaris rate and same with their fleet sizes. So I'm behind on basically every metric and end up surrounded with nowhere to go. Frustrating.

Seeing as this doesn't seem to be a huge complaint from people I can only assume I'm missing something fundamental here and some help would be appreciated!

My other question is about forming the Federation - I managed to end up in a coalition with the Andorians/Tellarites/Denobulans so I have the Agenda to form the UFP. But it says it's going to take near enough 10,000 months - that's about 800 years! Is there a reason for that, have I triggered it too early? Is there an event that brings that number down?