Aeson
Posts: 784
Joined: 8/30/2013
Status: offline
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I would suggest starting a prewarp game and keeping the empire small for a while with as little automation set as possible. Familiarize yourself with the tools for managing your empire, see which aspects you like and don't like to control manually and if and how these things change as your empire expands and develops (for example, I personally like controlling construction ships during the early stages of my empire's expansion, but as the empire grows I tend to start automating the ships, and I do much the same with exploration vessels, although that tends to be less 'as the empire grows' and more 'as the area I've explored expands;' if you start automating either of these, you may want to consider increasing the number of such vessels you have, as what the computer believes should be built/explored and in what order may not agree with your priorities, and having more of them out doing whatever alleviates that to some degree).
The main tools I use to control my empire are the Fleets (for maintaining fleets at full strength and for managing large numbers of fleets, though the menu does lack some features which would have been nice; I suggest standardizing and homogenizing fleet compositions and using a naming scheme to make this easier, since if every Task Force consists of 10 Missile Cruiser Mk.5s, I know what grabbing a somewhat random Task Force is going to get me, and I know that a Task Force with 8 ships needs to be reinforced with 2 new Missile Cruiser Mk.5s and may need repairs), Colonies (for managing tax rates, garrisons, troop recruitment, and facility construction), Ships and Bases (for organizing ships into fleets and for locating ships which are commonly not in fleets, such as Resupply Ships or the occasional Colony Ship), and Construction Yards (for ordering ships from specific locations to avoid issues with having to wait for the ships of a new fleet to collect from wherever the Build Orders menu would have ordered them from, and for avoiding placing orders at locations with construction backlogs or resource shortages) lists, the Designs menu, and the Expansion Planner (for assigning mining station construction missions and occasionally ordering colonization attempts; remember that yellow names indicate that there may be pirates or space monsters at the location while green names indicate that the object is in a system which contains one or more of your existing colonies), which are found in the top center portion of the screen. The Research Locations and Scenic Sites lists available on the left-hand side of the main screen are also useful; the Construction Ships and Exploration Ships lists may be as well, depending on how you end up managing your Construction and Exploration Ships (I personally tend to control both of these early on and then automate the majority later in the game; if you choose to automate these, you may want to build extras since the computer's priorities and yours may not align perfectly, and having more of them doing whatever the computer chooses helps alleviate that issue, though you could alternatively keep a couple under manual control for priority work, or select an automated vessel and override its current orders if you feel the need). The Potential Colonies list on the left side of the screen may also be helpful for assigning colonization missions, as it's a bit easier to see where the potential colony is with respect to what else you have by hovering over the potential colony in that list (which will cause that object to ping on the main map; you'll see yellow circles expand outward on the main map from its location if it's within, or nearly within, your current view area). Regardless, I'd recommend at least taking a look through all of the menus along the top and left edges of the screen to familiarize yourself with what they do and managing your empire manually with these for a while; even if you later decide to automate the things the tools are there to help you with (and thus don't use the tools), knowing what tools are at your disposal and how to use them is always useful.
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So where to start... - 
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