• Overview
• The Very First Steps
• Initial Goals

You are starting with one planet and a number of colony ships, usually two ships which you can immediately use. The number of ships available at the beginning of a galaxy is the same for all players and depends on the galaxy’s settings when it is being set up.

First of all you need to check the planets in your starting solar-system, if there are two or more fertile ones, settle those first. In the beginning planets with a food base production greater than 30 are especially desirable, as they will grow population quicker.

If the planets in your system are less productive, it is a perfectly good idea to send at least one of your colony ships to the nearest neighbouring solar-system. To do so, select one of your ships in the Galaxy-Map, and hover the mouse over a neighbouring star. This will popup a tooltip, which will display the distance and the number of turns it will take for this ship to arrive at the target.

If you did spot a planet in your starting system that you find desirable to colonize, right-click the ship in the Galaxy-Map. This will pop up a list of ship-commands. Pick Colonize Planet. The mouse cursor will change to signal that you need to pick the planet that you want to colonize. Hover the mouse over the desired planet, a route should be plotted and a tooltip should pop up giving detailed information about the target planet, and the ETA of arrival at the planet. If choose to colonize this planet, click with the left mouse-button, to complete the ship-command.

Note: if you use Move To instead of Colonize Planet, the ship will move to the planet, but once it arrives there, it will go into Hold Position mode. If you accidentally sent a ship to a planet without giving it the Colonize Planet command, the ship will “park” in its orbit, waiting for further instructions. At this point you should order it to colonize the planet. Please note that even if the ship is already at its target, you will still need to select the planet in order to complete the ship-command!

You can confirm whether the ship has accepted your order, by hovering the mouse over the ship-icon in the Galaxy-Map. Its route should be shown, and the tooltip should display the colonization ship-command symbol, together with the name and coordinates of the planet.

Alternatively you can have a look in the Ships Screen. In the command column it should say the same thing, together with the ETA in the next column.

In the Galaxy-Map double-click your home planet. This will open the Planet View inside the Main-Window. You should order your planet to start building something. Actually it is recommended to always have your planets build something.

To do so, hover the mouse over the Production Storage, and left click it. This will pop up a list of things you can build on this planet. This list is very limited in the beginning, as you have no technologies researched yet.

You can either build another Colony ship, if you intend to expand quickly, or you can decide to build another Farm if you rather want to grow your planet. Every additional farm will increase the food production per farmer by 25%. You can continue building farms as long as that planet has available space.

This might also be a good point to play around a bit with the citizen assignment. Right click on a citizen to bring up a list of possible jobs. These are:

• Farmer: Produces food, depending on the planets base production and the amount of farms built on the planet. Produces some income, and requires some food per turn.
• Worker: Produces production, depending on the planets base production and the amount of factories built on the planet. Produces some income, and requires some food per turn.
• Scientist: Produces research, depending on the planets base production and the amount of universities built on the planet. Produces some income, and requires some food per turn.
• Miner: Produces ship-resources, depending on the planets base production and the amount of mines built on the planet. Produces some income, and requires food per turn.
• Banker: Produces income, depending on the amount of banking centers built on the planet. Requires some food per turn.
• Military: Requires some upkeep per turn. It is not actually a part of the planet’s population, as it does not produce anything and does not effect the size of the food storage box. However, it does make sense to “station” military on a planet, as they will be trained for ship-combat and increase their rank. A higher rank of the ship-crew will be beneficial during ship-battles. Stationed Military can be trained quicker, and to a higher level, by building a Military Camp and/or a Military Academy on that planet.
  Most importantly stationed military protect a planet against invasions. An aggressor would have to kill all stationed military before conquering a planet.
  It is possible to draft military from the population. This will however cost a considerable amount of credits, especially later in the game (since the cost increases the more military you have). In the start, however, you might get away with drafting a few citizens to man those crucial first colony ships.

When changing the citizen’s assignment, you should immediately see an impact in the various calculation tables. For instance the food surplus produced per turn should change, if you change the number of farmers on the planet. Hover the mouse over the various calculation tables to see the calculation details.

Finally, you should pick a technology that you want your scientists to focus on. Enter the Research Screen and get acquainted with it. By hovering the mouse over the various technologies you should see some more detailed information displayed in tooltips.

The color-coding has the following meaning:

• Dark Blue: represents technologies that you have already researched.
• Light Blue: represents technologies that you can start researching immediately, as you do have all prerequisites.
• Gray: represents technologies that you cannot yet research.
• Orange: represents the technology that is currently researched.
• Brown: represents technologies that will be researched in order to reach the targeted technology.

You don’t need to research the technologies one by one, every time a technology becomes available - instead you can click on a target technology further down the tree. All required technologies will be automatically researched. Technologies that require fewer research points will be researched first.