So you've turned on the game, played the first official 'tutorials' at the start. You're dumped out into space next to the base of some folk called "Argons" (they're basically space humans, not that it matters). And the fighting is a pain, there's never enough money, the missions are repetitive, the dialog is stunted, the help menu seems to alternate between 'just figure it out' and stuff that's as easy to navigate as a municipal code... so how in the world does this game have positive ratings? What are you supposed to do? When does this get 'fun'? Cool, we're on the same page, read on to get past all that. Introduction So you've turned on the game, played the first official 'tutorials' at the start. You're dumped out into space next to the base of some folk called "Argons" (they're basically space humans, not that it matters). You're told you should now take missions, mine, trade, and maybe scan bases for extra cash... now what? First off I'm not an 'expert' on this game. I'm a relatively new player who hit this wall of 'now what' and slowly, painfully, grinded his way to get to the point where the game started being fun. I did it by asking a ton of questions in the discussion areas (there are some great players in that community), watching youtube videos, googling stuff.. I did it because of the great reviews this game has, because I could see the seeds of a good game in an otherwise painful experience, and probably some sunk-cost fallacy. And I want to help you get to 'the fun part' as quickly as possible, because there IS some cool stuff in here. Let's start, and apologies for my tone not being enthusiastic and bubbly. But you clicked on something that said "Cynic's Guide" so... Before you begin Before you actually start. Get back in that tutorial mission with the combat. You will find the combat utterly sucks and makes no sense. That's because the starting controls make zero sense.. so change them. There are a bunch of suggestions out there for better keybinds, or make your own, keep trying different things, keep replaying that mission, until you find a control schema that feels natural to you. Because you'll be using it for a looooong time so get this fixed before you get much further. For me, personally, the most important changes / settings are: Movement: * W 'down', 'S' up, 'A' left, 'D' right * 'Q' rotate left, 'E' rotate right * Shift+'W' accelerate * Shift+'S' decelerate * 'X' match speed, Shift+'X' stop * [Tab] thrust / afterburners (hint, you can afterburner to high speed and then switch to travel mode to quickly get up to speed / away from stuff) Modes: Shift+.. ..1: travel ..2: scan ..3: long-range scan Guns layouts: 1,2,3,4 The rest is all pretty-much to-taste or accessible through menus ([return/enter], that's the keys I find myself reaching for most of the time Ok, NOW start the game (foundations) There is a story / guide! You're in a ship. You are told to do missions. Meh. All you can do are 'easy' and 'very easy' missions and you'll have an easier / more fun time doing those once you get your free super-zoomie ship, so skip that. You'll be told to find folk that let you 'join the war against the Holy Order..'. Don't. This isn't an RPG (it just looks like it) and the Holy Order aren't 'bad guys'. They're just a faction that has some ships you'll want later on. For which you'll need a positive reputation with them, that's harder to grind if you join a fight against them. Also there's no plot there (it just tricks you into thinking there's a plot there, its a trap). (The 'Xenos' are the bad guys - oh, sorry, 'Xenon' - feel free to join the war against them, but don't do the missions till you have the zoomie ship or you'll hate your life) It is hinted that you should mine. Your ship isn't good for that, mining is insanely boring. It is hinted that you should trade. Your ship isn't good for that, you don't have enough of the map visible to do that. There's a brief snipped that you can scan stations for cash. This is a boring process where you move at insanely low speeds along bases in scan mode, trying to spot the blinking things that are 'sparks' instead of the million blinking things that are just blinking lights. .......... Surprisingly, this is exactly what you want to do right away. WAIT! Before you close this guide for suggesting this insanely.. slow.. tedious.. painful.. activity...... This is how you unlock the ACTUAL story-missions / tutorial / first-base!! Yea, I wouldn't have guessed it either, until way-too-many hours in the game. Because normal game-design that we've learned over decades of playing games is that the main mission / tutorial stuffs are supposed to hook you early and be virtually unavoidable, not hidden easter-eggs. But here were are. Don't worry about it, you're not really playing an RPG, so don't hold it to the standards of an RPG, we'll get past that. So you HAVE to start by slow-scanning bases (don't know if its random or always on the base you started from) to actually get started. Scan mode activated, move.. slowly.. over.. the.. station... Spot the tiny crackling thing.. Hopefully you'll quickly hit one where a Boron (like a.. fish-elephant-thing...) tells you they have a job for you. Something about landing back on the base, getting out of your ship, and following the yellow line to pick up a briefcase. Ok, you're now in the story (which is actually a series of kind of fun missions. Doing 'the story' So you're doing the 'story' / initial tutorial. You'll hit two walls: resources and 'what in the world am I supposed to do next'? Let's start with the second part, but at each point you hit a wall of 'I can't afford X' or 'my ship isn't good enough to do Y' then skip down and do the rest of the guide until you get past it, then come back here. So, 'what in the world am I supposed to do next'? The 'tutorial' / 'main mission' is painfully short on details in places. Criminally so given that missions have this giant empty ''briefing" space where someone (a game dev with 5 minutes free after lunch) could easily type 'do this now, and you do it by clicking this and this'. Not exactly voice-over costs, just some basic effort. Anyway. Some people will suggest you're supposed to dig through the 'help' and encyclopedia and what not. .. For those of us who don't enjoy cramming for exams, digging through obscure lessons in order to have fun? Its the 21st century, so Youtube this stuff. Here's the video you want:

Yes, spoilers. Don't worry about it, this isn't exactly high-drama nail-biting murder-mystery. Just play through until you get stuck. Then watch a bit further forward in the video till you get to and through where you were stuck. Hit pause, go back to playing. Repeat till you have a base and are done with the 'fun' missions. When it comes to building out your first base don't forget to hire / transfer / assign a manager, and buy / assign a Transport ship or two to 'trade' for that manager / base. Otherwise getting it built out will take... for... ever... (or you have to manually fly all those resources over. Which, great if you wanna play space-trucker, nothing wrong with that. Otherwise though.. hire one) Hiring a manager Starting funds So you need money. First you need some quick starting capital. Technically missions could give you that. Maybe they're supposed to? Your ship is crap, you can't fight for crap-all until you get some other units watching your back, the 'easy' missions take a while to complete and quickly get repetitive. Instead go out into those mineral fields. Look for blinking stuff on the asteroids. Go to them, shoot the crystals, sell them at the 'Trader' inside the base (you have to get out of your ship), rinse and repeat until you have a few hundred-thousand $ worth of crystals. Here you go, this is what you do. Getting crystals (There's supposedly a mod for this too, though I haven't tried it) Modded cheaty version Is this 'fun'? No. Is it more fun and less time-intensive then those other ways of making that initial starting-funds? For me it was, but you do you. I hear crystals got nerfed (trying to drive people to the missions? No idea) but for me it was good enough to get going anyway. Just get to enough money to get to the next part of the guide (and maybe repeat this from time to time) Making the money You're in the cockpit of what seems like a fighter, there are factions to join, missions to be had, space to explore, all the tutorials focused on the 1st-player experience... I see why you might be tempted to think this is an RPG. It is not. This is a 4x strategy game that you happen to play in first-player a lot of the time. Why does this matter? In an RGP you fly around doing cool stuff to earn money and unlocks and such. In a 4x game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) what do you start by doing? That's right, you find your natural starting resources (eXplore), grab some quick SCVs, drones, peasants, peons, whatever and you throw them at your natural resources. (eXploit) Then you use the money to quickly build out more of that until you have a decent economy, at which point you start cranking out your initial zerg or whatever to protect them and move into the 'meat' of the game. (eXpand, eXterminate) That's kind of what you have to do here. 1) Your 'drones' are your mining vessels. You buy them (size small or medium) at 'wharfs' using 'buy ship', set them to 'local automine in your naturals. Where are your 'naturals'? You want sectors that have blue bases (blue just means friendly) with mineral sectors (asteroids for normal mining, gas for gas mining) AND bases that buy what you're mining. You can see what's bought and sold by using the filter (top right) and look at 'buy' to make sure it includes the stuff you're planning to harvest. Drop resource beacons in mineral / gas fields so your units can have an idea of what minerals are where in that sector. Mining 2) Your next 'SCVs' are your trading vessels. They're a bit more complicated to use. So captains / pilots have a 'star' rating. As far as what you care about, it means 'what can these do'. At 1 star (you can get them to 1 star through power-ups you buy at just about any station, if they're not there already) they can do local auto-trade (probably useless to you) or 'repeat command'. On repeat command you can right-click to 'buy' a resource from a base and 'sell' it to another.. and then if you expand out the 'buy' and 'sell' section in 'behavior' you can add a bunch of Other locations to buy and sell from, and control the prices you're buying and selling at. So what you Don't need to do is worry about the exact price at every station. Just add all of the ones you see that 'buy' the resource you wanna sell and that 'sell' what you wanna buy. Don't worry about prices, your 'min' and 'max' costs will make sure you're always selling at a higher price then you bought stuff. That may sound weird to those who play normal trading games, where you look for the lowest cost sale, and then sell at the highest price. You can't do that in this game because the prices change too frequently for you to manually try and deal with that. Remember, 4x game, not RPG. So, for example, here are the 'average' prices people keep mentioning in comments: Wares costs[egosoft.com] Just set your 'buy at' cost under the average, your 'sell at' cost over it, and you'll always make some kind of profit. Also you'll wanna drop satellites near the bases you're buying / selling at so your units know what the costs are without having to drive over there to find out. So, for example, lets say you wanna trade in Antimatter Cells. * You find that locations A,B,C sell Antimatter (doesn't matter for how much, it will change quickly and constantly). * Grab your trader, 'repeat orders', right click location A and say 'buy from' [A], anti-matter, $500. (Or however much - the average in that chart is 540, so you wanna just be lower then that. Go too low and you'll frequently have bases not selling for that price point, get too close to the average and you won't make any profit). * Go into the trader's behavior. You'll see 'buy' is in there which, if you expand, says they're buying from locationA. And give you an option to 'Add'. So move your map to location B, 'Add' in behavior, right click location B, and 'select'. It should now be added to the list of places you're buying from. Repeat for location C. * Then you see that locations X,Y,Z are buying antimatter. Right click it and 'Sell to'. Then do the same stuff as you did for 'buy' but you're selling to X,Y,Z and for some price above average, like $600. You can do sequential orders.. see the linked video on repeat orders for more advanced stuff. If you frequently look at your map and see your traders sitting around twiddling their thumbs you may need to tweak their buy and sell prices, and/or adding more bases for them to look at. Once you hit 2-stars (there should be some power-ups for that too, or just wait) you can have the transports just 'fulfill shortages' or such for a mineral. Then you don't have to micromanage bases, but they may fly to dangerous places so be careful. There's a ton of videos out there on mining and trading 'cause it is a big part of the game. Here's some but you'll likely look at a lot more. Local AutotradingRepeat OrdersFill Shortages Natural expansions So your blue-base areas were friendly, but you can't dock / sell at the orange ones. That's because they don't like you (your rep is under 8 or so). This is easy enough to solve. Fly over (weapons off) to their bases. Don't engage their defenders if they send them out, just fly elsewhere if they're hurting you - the drones probably won't. Each station (in most cases) will soon spawn a 'criminal'. Select them (nearest enemy) Make sure it says they are a 'criminal' (red letters in the description) Shoot them (make sure NOT to hit the station - wait for a clear shot!!) Fly to the next station. Repeat until your reputation is under 8 and you can dock. Now your SCVs/peons can mine, sell, and trade in those areas, which will steadily keep increasing your rep with that faction. You can also do missions for them now to more quickly increase your rep until you can buy some of their 'really cool stuff' Improving reputations Base building: Blueprints We're almost there now, to the 4x strategy part of the game. So you have a starting base (from that 'secret' mission). You have a starter economy where you're pulling in money. You have a few decent starting ships (the zoomie one for doing most of stuff, the frigate for some of the shootiness, probably some zerg units - light fighters - guarding some of your traders or miners or whatever). You want to build a base. There are a ton of guides on youtube of your starting base, how to make wafers and green energy and self-sufficient productions. You excitedly jump in to make them happen aaaaaaaand the only thing you can do is throw on some solar panels on your base because everything else is locked. Fantastic. You can buy blueprints from faction representatives. And most of them are stupidly expensive. You can get Some starter ones at a reasonable cost (totally ok to go that route) so you can save up and dive into wafer productions, then wait until you get enough money to do the 'fun stuff'. ... yea, I thought the same thing. Ok, here's the trick you're supposed to know: you're supposed to use Bombs. Step 1) Make sure you do the Research (from that secret mission) to let you hack blueprints Step 2) Make and use bombs: Go to trading station and unlock spacesuit bombs. Go to pirate stations to get components for EMP bombs - loadstone (you can also get it from following miners around), remote detonators (mostly from black market and pirate stations), and secure containers (various merchants, lockboxes) Sometimes you can just buy the EMP straight up if you find it. Go to crafting stations to composite them into bombs. Making bombs Now fly up to a station where they built the thing you wanna build. Fly out of your ship and hit that thing (eg. the ore refinery) with an EMP. Four little sparky things will appear. Spacesuit your way to each of them. Chances are that one of them will be the blueprint. You may take a slight rep hit, just get back in your ship and hunt down some 'criminals' near their bases to fix it. Using the bombs But wait!! Which part of the building do you hit? They all look pretty stationy.. Open the map. Zoom to the station till its nice and big. Maybe even right-click rotate the map if you want. On the left you have that info-dump to navigate. Top row, pick 'stations & all ships' (its the far left one you start with). Left column pick 'Object list' (its the top one you start with). You'll see the station you're zoomed in on and a little '+'. Click that to expand it out to see the various modules in there. Expand those out and click on what you wanna steel. It is now glowing red so you know what to fly too and bang! There's your blueprint! You can now build the stuff in those other tutorials, and you're at the 4x part of the game! Conclusion Ok! You are now at the 4x portion of the game. You have an economy, you have a starting base, you can afford the designs for the cool ships... Now just start looking at youtube videos for the cool guides on fleet compositions and management and all that good stuff. Captain Collins seems to have the most fun 'positive' (ie not my tone) videos on this game, but there's others. And from what I can tell the expansions to this game have a bit more hand-holding and 'fun' starts (but kinda expect you to know all the stuff in this guide) so maybe look into those if you now like the game. Captain Collins Good luck, keep calm, and stay shiny.