Dalek continuity went out the window with only their second appearance.
Terry Nation never intended the creatures to have a history beyond the events of a single story. His original idea wouldn't even have left the Daleks as villains. A third party had started the war between them and the Thals, and they showed up at the end of the story to say sorry and help the warring factions make friends with each other.
Luckily Nation changed his mind, but - unluckily - he killed off the Daleks in their entirety at the conclusion of their debut. He was out of a job and keen to earn a few quid whilst waiting for something more prestigious to come along - describing The Daleks as a "hack job", where he took the money and ran - his phrase. In interviews later he couldn't even remember how many episodes it was.
Someone - probably David Whitaker - reminded Nation that Doctor Who was about a time traveller, so when it came to a follow-up - The Dalek Invasion of Earth - he was able to simply say that what we witnessed on Skaro happened at another point in history.
The problem was, he opted for the wrong direction.
In The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Ian asks the Doctor how they can be seeing Daleks when they were all wiped out on Skaro. The Doctor tells him that those events were in the far future, and they are currently seeing the "middle history" of the Daleks.
The big problem with this is that these Daleks are clearly more advanced than the ones on Skaro, able to travel across the universe, not reliant of static electricity generated through the floors of their city, or on the working of a single piece of equipment in their control room. It is a general rule of thumb that more advanced = more recent.
Fandom has it that the Daleks on Skaro are the ones which exterminated Davros. Without him, they have failed to develop and have stagnated in their city. It is early days for them, rather than their far future.
But they all get wiped out, I hear you cry. It can't possibly be the past...
There are ways round this:
(a) The Daleks we see dying may only be going into a dormant state. Power of the Daleks shows that a Dalek can remain in this state for centuries. Davros himself will lie dormant for many years.
(b) This might be only one of several Dalek cities on Skaro. There was no petrified forest around the Kaled city we see in the 1975 story.
In Genesis of the Daleks Nation elects to show us the creation of his monsters - encouraged to do so by Barry Letts after he had first submitted another derivative run-around (military expedition fighting Daleks on a hostile planet - presumably named after some geographical / environmental aspect of that world).
Contrary to the fan outcry at the time, it does not necessarily contradict what we learned in The Daleks. Back in the Hartnell story, we only had the ancient tales of the Thals and the Daleks to go on - stories which could easily have been corrupted over time.
The missing petrified forest is a problem. One can't grow afterwards. Another problem is the Dalek design. These are gunmetal grey Daleks, with the vertical slats round the middle section - a design which doesn't come in until they are space-going empire-builders. We also see them traverse the terrain of Skaro, when they ought to be confined to metal floors.
But, as I've already pointed out, there is always the fact that the Daleks of their first story are the Genesis ones - just regressed and backwards in their technology.
As far as I'm concerned, Genesis of the Daleks and The Daleks can sit comfortably next to each other as the first two Dalek stories, in terms of their chronology. It is actually the later chronology which poses the most headaches, even setting aside the whole Time War.
Do the Davros stories change Dalek history? He's entirely absent from it until Genesis - not even a mention. Or does he come back after the defeat of The Dalek Masterplan? Do the Daleks master bigger-on-the-inside time machines then lose the skill, or do the Hartnell "DARDIS" stories come much later than the Pertwee ones? Was the civil war on Skaro "the final end" or just another blip? And where the heck does Power of the Daleks fit in?
All questions for another time...
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