I didn’t make this guide to suggest anything, because there is a forum for that. I just noticed that there was only one guide made so far, and, I thought it could be helpful to make some notes of things I have seen… I am fully aware I don’t have 200 hours on file, and my experience is limited, so, please, feel free to either message me or, create another guide if mine is overtly wrong, or, lacking in specific technical details. This is merely my initial take on a few starting game mechanics.

You do the prologue…and it ends abruptly about 30 minutes in, so, then its free roam time. What do we do in free roam? Whatever we want. What follows are the things that I have done. Are there better or worse ways? Yes and yes. This isn't a walk through, though, I do have some recommendations. (As commented below, it is a prologue at this point, not a campaign, as I alluded to earlier. Mea Culpa.)

Initially, probably the best way to get money. You can select the missions at your home station and friendly planets (Or rather, the one planet you can see right from the get go.) A marker is placed in your HUD and on the map to show you the location of the mission you have selected. There are recommend levels for the missions you select, but, I haven’t noticed huge difference in difficulty depending on which one you select, up to a certain point. (Plus, as I will mention later, your game level doesn’t seem to so far be dictated by your “game skill”.) However, what I will say…your level can be boosted by a few things. Your corresponding level of skill or ship type, doesn’t necessarily keep exact pace with the difficulty scaling of the missions. So, yes, they offer more money for completion, but, some don’t seem to be worth your time and effort for the level scaling of the difficulty. I’ll let you decide on your own for that one though…

1. Trading missions: So far, you simply just travel to that point, select the ship you find at that location, get close (within 300 units or so) and select “transfer”. That’s it. Supposedly you get more if you travel there faster, but, shy of anyone attacking you, it’s a fairly straight forward task. So far, these I would recommend no matter your level, doesn’t seem to be any difference in difficulty, besides your get more money for completion. (Edit, I WAS ATTACKED at about a level 25 mission. However, all I had to do was run away, escaped, and was still able to complete the mission. I still recommend these missions over all others!)

2. Assassination: So far, these have been pretty simple too. Usually one ship to destroy. They give you an option to interact with them. Again, so far, it doesn’t matter if you tell them to surrender, they never comply. I don’t know if I haven’t managed to figure out this secret yet, or, if it hasn’t been implemented. (Edit: As commented below, people have been successful making target surrender. This may be based upon your current load out. Also, at higher levels they change to "Search and Destroy". These added a little flair to the initial mission being that you had some options to try and "disable" another ship before hand....ummm...well, it didn't seem to do anything. I ended up being killed handily, so, I revise this to "not recommend".)

3. Station defense: Lower levels, so far, have been easy enough. I haven’t tried higher level defense missions yet, so, I can’t comment.

4. Station attack: I HAVE tried higher level station attacks. Unless you have a great ship, stay away from these. I thought I had a good ship but the level scaling on the defense turrets seems to be awry. They made mince-meat of me pretty quickly for my in game level.

5. Mining missions?: Something didn’t seem to work correctly my first couple of attempts for these, the game got hung up with me trying to find something that wasn’t there. I just stay away from these for now.

6. Random galactic map missions: There are also some other “markers” on the galactic map. If you fly toward these there is usually some in game prompt. A lot of these are anomaly scanning. Easy to do, gives some money. Some of these ask you to investigate a signal. I had issues with a few of them I tried to do, game got hung up one something that wasn’t there. I don’t accept these any more.

7. Civilian fleet missions: Click and “send fleet”. I’m sure there will be more to this at some point, but, for now, that’s it. Easy way to get other resources. They do require some resources to do, but, so far at low levels, they don’t seem to require so many resources that I have to strategically pick and choose where to send my fleets. Again, this may be changed at some point, but, for now, no effect. Occasionally, your fleets will fail, or, only be partially successful. If this happens, you just choose another mission after they appear, so, doesn't seem to affect much yet either.

So, pretty quickly you notice that you don’t have much money, compared to how much things cost. There are a couple of avenues that you can make money. The above way, doing missions, is good initially to get some money. I would recommend to start getting there a different way in a hurry though, because even at level 15, missions only yield 200k credits. Still chump change when bigger ships cost 80 million…

• Mining: This was my initial way. Strip the turrets from your vessel so you default to the “mining laser”. Fly back and forth between the mineral field and your home base. The mining laser destroy the asteroids instantly, your turrets take time and energy. This will rack up some money, but, your cargo holds are limited. So, I would say do some missions until your get enough money to buy the initial freighter.

• Trading: As soon as you can…BUY A FREIGHTER. (WARNING!!!: Don’t “trade” your initial ship in to buy it. Right now, whatever turrets or heavy weapons are on your ship when you “trade” go with that ship. The weapons are really expensive to buy back. So, unless you specifically make sure you have stripped those weapons off, do not trade your vessel.)

o So, now that you have a freighter: what to do? Well, you can keep on mining, or, you can start trading. Right now, this system is very uncomplicated. You buy and sell, and the prices are always the same. Will this change? Maybe, but right now, you buy 100 units of XYZ, you sell 100 units of XYZ and you repeat, as the stock of items is always the same, whenever you return back to whatever planet or station you are doing this on. There are 3 items initally that you want to buy and sell from your station to the planet and vice versa.

Station: Hydroponic Pods, Fertilizers, Envirosuits.

Planet: Medicines, Surgical Equipment, Vegetables.

Suffice to say, over the course of about an hour of doing this, you will have a couple million credits. To me, this got boring really quick, so, I bought another ship to try it out. Theoretically, you could do this until you had enough credits to buy the next biggest freighter, and then do it again and quickly get to the 80 million credit carrier. Up to you. (Edit, I did this up to 8 million, bought the next biggest freighter, and then got to 10 million...before I got REALLY bored again.)

• AFK: Is this tactic effective? At lower levels, not really... but it takes no effort on your part, so , reward to energy input is 100% effective. The theory here is that you make a few (like, very few at low levels) credits a second. If you park yourself in space, and go AFK (like, overnight) you come back and have more money! Well, this will stress your system quite heavily, and, really doesn’t net that many credits. So, yeah, it works, and if you do this over and over, and manage to get yourself to some point where you have a reasonable income per second, then, maybe its viable. Anyway, it’s an option. (Edit: After you capture 10 or so regions, your income will be around 50 per second. After 12 Hours, this is like 2 Million Credits. May be worthwhile after this.)

Nope, get back to making money somehow. Weapons cost money. Better weapons cost more money. I’ve seen some forum posts about this and proposed alternatives to alter this. Anyway, this isn’t that discussion so, get money, buy bigger weapons. So far, there isn’t any reason to “step up” to any weapons in between the lowest tier and highest tier…besides boredom in between making the money and wanting to blow things up.

Now, if you decided to trade, you may have noticed you gained levels for trading. I am certain someone knows the source code behind this, but to me, the layman, I got a lot of levels while getting a lot of money. As stated before, game level does not correlate to skill level. I had some money, and the levels needed to by bigger ships. My fighting skill and knowledge base was still pretty low, and doing some missions I thought I would breeze by (as mentioned above) didn’t seem to quite work that way. Random encounters and missions just seem to get harder and harder the further your level up. (Again, not discussing the merits of this system, only what I noticed.)

To take over surrounding sectors, you send your war fleets to surrounding garrisons. This is still a work in progress. This is still a work in progress. This is still a work in progress.

o Click on your warlfeets, click on a garrison in a hostile territory. The battle will auto resolve.

o Do not be in the same sector, or near the garrison you are attacking. At the end, it will ask to send troopers to the garrison to take over, and this either doesn’t work yet, or, is bugged. Either way, your fleets don’t really need you yet; they will take over the system just fine on their own. This is still a work in progress.

o Not all of the garrisons show their strength. Is this by design or not? I have no idea. So far, with a fleet of only 1000, I have not been “defeated yet”. This is still a work in progress. (Edit, I "lost" one encounter with a fleet power of 1800, but, still acquired the sector. *Shrugs*)

o Actually, that is not true: I have been defeated…but then took over the sector and all of my ships were back a few minutes later. This is still a work in progress.

o Enemies don’t seem to attack back yet. This is still a work in progress.

o I ran into one random fleet that wasn’t posted by a garrison, and I couldn’t send my fleet to engage. This is still a work in progress.

o You build up your warfleets by having your civilian fleets do missions, gaining resources over time, and by actually capturing different sectors for their input into your coffers. You can’t control or assign captains, or, really do much of anything to your warfleets at all except add ships to it. Your station can be upgraded to allow for “bigger” warfleets. See above, this is still a work in progress.