Defensive strategy guide
This guide assumes that you intend to play for the foreseeable future, but do not want to put significant time into the game at the moment. It will take you from the very beginning of gameplay to more advanced techniques.
The very beginning
In the very beginning of the game, a purple haired lady will guide you through some exercises intended to teach you how to spend resources. "Resources Spent" is one of the main rankings for this game, so pay some attention. Also, doing what she says gives you a chance to score a few additional ships.
When you are done with this tutorial, you will have two Atlas, two Ares, and two Hermes probes. This small arsenal isn't much use for battles except in rare circumstances, but it will allow you to run missions. Running missions is particularly important to beginning players in universes where you can complete tasks for free if it would take less than five minutes. You will need more resources to build up your mines to a higher level. If you can keep completing things in less than five minutes, then build up the crystal and ore mines until they take just over five minutes. Then start working on the hydrogen mine. Upgrade the solar field to keep up with demand as best as you can. Once those take more than five minutes, you will hopefully be able to get enough hydrogen to upgrade the capitol, and cut down on build times a bit, so you can get more levels in mines faster, because mines make resources, and spending resources gets your name higher on the leader board. By the time things always cost more than five minutes, you'll want to focus your energy. Crystal will be important for a lot of the game. Let's make some of that.
Unlock tech
Resources can be spent on more bouldings, on ships or defenses in the shipyard, on droids in the factory and on research in the Research Lab. We will want to unlock these buildings so that we can do all these things. However, we will want to do them in a certain order. Research never dies. Ships can get shot down, and droids must be moved from planet to planet before you abandon the world. For this reason, we will focus on the research lab first, then the shipyard, and finally the factory. ideally, you will also keep upgrading the mines, and running missions, so that you have a continuous stream of income to keep building, researching, making ships, and making droids simultaneously... sort of.
Branch Out
One one planet, you can only upgrade one building at a time. You can only make one ship at a time. You can only make one droid at a time. You only have one ore mine, one crystal mine, and one hydrogen mine. Also, each upgrade of a mine costs more, and takes longer to finish. Teasing you on the top of your screen are eight empty colony slots. With each of these, you can upgrade buildings, make ships, build droids... simultaneously... nine at a time. to do this, you will need a Gaia Class colony ship. Why can't you build it yet?? Check on the Tech tab. I prefer viewing the Full Index, but whatever works for you.
to build a Gaia class colony ship, your shipyard must be upgraded to level 4, and your Pulse Drive must be researched to level 3. What's that you say? Oh, you can't research Pulse Drive yet. That's because your research lab needs to be upgraded to level 2, and your Energy tech needs to be upgraded to level 1. Yes... things take time. If you're getting impatient, I will point out that upgrading the Capitol allows for much faster build times. However, this Homeworld of yours is not going to last very long, so don't get too attached to it.
Once you can build Gaia class colony ships, you can colonize some planets. At this early point, you will probably just want to colonize the other planets in your solar system, so that you can transport stuff between planets faster. Once you've researched your jet drive, pulse drive, and warp drive a bit, this will hardly matter, but for now, you might as well keep things close together.
Planet-picking strategy
Since you've got a Gaia class colony ship, now is a good time to discuss planet picking strategy. So, let's click on the "Galaxy" tab, and view your Galaxy. You will notice that in reality, there is no way to view a whole galaxy in starfleet command. You are looking instead at your system. Every system has 15 planet slots. An empty system will basically look like a spreadsheet that hasn't been filled out. A busy system, on the other hand, will have debris next to a lot of the planet slots, other players, and between planet slots, there may be Moons, and NPCs. None of that really matters much just yet.
Systems
Each system stats at 1, and ends at 15. 1 is closest to the systems invisible sun. It is the hottest, and solar satellites produce the most energy there. However, we are defensive players, and will hardly use those at all. 15 is farthest from the moon. 15 allows the hydrogen synthesizer and nuclear power plant to work at optimum efficiency. Everybody wants hydrogen and energy, so this side of the "galaxy" page is more desirable for anyone who isn't hoping to get a quick pile of ore or crystal from a straight mining world.
The bottom of the system list is also more desirable for another reason: Hunters. Player characters who scan the galaxy pages looking for an easy target like yourself. You'll probably notice that if you could read the words in the planet slot, you also had to scroll down to see the bottom of the list. Some hunters won't be motivated enough to bother doing that if the top few planet slots in the system are empty. Some will also just find a good target up there, and not bother you.
Lastly, we must discuss the effects of that roving terror known as the Hephaestus Class Attack Platform
