• Overview
• The Very First Steps
• Initial Goals

You should try to colonize as many planets as possible, and to grow your existing planets. Build Colony Ships to explore the suns around you. Every sun that you see in the Galaxy Map represents a solar-system that you have not explored yet. Naturally you start exploring and colonizing your direct neighbors. You might find other players pretty soon. You can decide if you want to ally with them, or make them your enemies and try to steal their planets - which might already be quite advanced.

Your planets need to grow as well. You should order your planets to build facilities, in fact always try to keep them busy building something. You can use the Production-Queue to make a planet build an entire list of facilities or ships, one after the other. If a planet does not produce anything, its production is turned into wealth - credits. You should only really do this if you are low on money.

Facilities allow you to improve a planet. For instance, you can build several Farms to increase the production of your Farmers on that planet. Each farm you build increases the food production by +25% per farmer. So if your planet had a base production of 30 Food, plus you had 2 farms on this planet, every farmer would produce 45 Food per turn!

Keep in mind though that every farm uses up space, and especially on small planets you need to think about how to use your available space most efficiently. Farms also become more expensive to build the more you have of them already. The first farm is the cheapest, but the fifth one on this planet might be quite expensive already. This is true of nearly all facilities - the more you have build of one type already, the more the next one will cost to build.

The more food you produce the quicker a planet also grows population wise. Every excessive food that is not consumed by the planets population, is put into the Food-Storage. Once that is completely filled up it is converted into a new citizen. This is how you grow new citizens.

The same principle is used for Production. The more Production points your Workers produce, the quicker you can build facilities, ships and scans. All the Production points produced on a planet are put into the Production-Storage. Once that is full, the object you are building is available. Excessive production points are used for the next production. No production points will ever get lost.

Of course there are not only farms that you can build, even though in the beginning the list of available facilities is quite limited. What you need to do is to research new technologies, that give you access to new types of facilities, new ship-equipment and other things. The more Scientists you have assigned on your planets, the more Science points are overall produced per turn.

All the Science points produced by your planets combined is used to research a new technology. In the Research Tree you can select which technology you want researched next. You can even click on one further down the tree, which will automatically research all the technologies required to receive the one you picked. Tooltips in the research tree should give you detailed information of what a particular technology does and what it allows you to build.

You need to make wise decisions on how many citizens you want to assign to Science, how quickly you want to grow your planets, how many people you want to put on colony ships, and so forth. You want to grow and expand, and at the same time not fall behind in technology - because your enemies might be more advanced than you already, which would not be very advantageous when meeting them in a battle...

Governors and Admirals are crucial concepts in Cosmic Supremacy. They make sure your empire runs smoothly when you’re not around to take care of business. If, for instance, you’re asleep at the time you complete the research that allow you to build factories, the governor can start construction of the new facility right away.

Admirals, on the other hand, take over your fleets when you’re not there to bark orders at the captains.

For new players, the best approach to learning about Governors and Admirals is perhaps to grow them alongside your empire. Start with a simple Governor, add another simple one to that, then add some more to the first as the need arises. You may also opt to copy more complex Governors from the Player Guides, though you might have to adjust those, and without experience that could result in serious damage to your empire. Governors and Admirals are powerful tools that can make or break a game for you.

You will undoubtedly make mistakes, whichever way you turn, but you’ll remember that these are the ones we learn from.