1. Do you have general Tips for the start ?
For your first couple or so games, play at a low difficulty to get a feel for the game's mechanics at your own pace.
1. Expand.
Most of your income will come from taxes, and to get a lot of taxes, you need a lot of people. Send your colony ship to a nearby planet, and start making another one at your Starport. More planets mean more people, but also mean higher maintenance costs. Try to grab two or three other planets at the very beginning, and then stop making colony ships. This should be enough to get a feel for things.
2. In the beginning, since you have very few people, you will make very little money. However, your initial funds are there to make up for the inevitable loss of money at the start. Open your Domestic panel, and set the Production slider to 100%. Keep the tax rate low at the beginning to encourage population growth. Watch as your population rises and your income improves. Eventually, you will start making consistent profit.
Adjust the sliders according to the situation, but you should aim to be able to keep the Production slider at 100% more or less throughout the entire game. Once you have a decent population, gradually raise the Tax rate slider. Doing so will decrease your Approval rating, but as long as your Approval is higher than 50%, your population will grow. Higher approval means faster growth, of course.
3. Planetary improvements (i.e. buildings) increase your industry and research output.
Industry (also called Manufacturing) is divided into Military and Social production. Military production affects the rate of ship building, while Social production determines how fast you can build improvements on your planets.
Research output determines how fast you research new techs.
Obviously, more military and research production is better, right? However, most improvements have a maintenance cost. If you have too many, you might not be able to afford the maintenance. If you have too little, your industry and research will be retarded. Build a few improvements at first, and wait for your population to grow before building more. You might have a nice planet with a very high Planet Quality (i.e. a lot of tiles to build on), but attempting to fill all the tiles at the beginning is usually very bad for your economy.
Buy your first few Factories; this will drastically reduce the time it takes for you to build other improvements.
2. Should I buy both Add-Ons right from the start, or is the normal Version good enough to play first ?
The expansions
drastically improve the game in almost every imaginable way: AI, gameplay, graphics quality, memory efficiency, etc. After playing Twilight of the Arnor, I cannot, in any way, imagine playing without it. This latest expansion gives every race unique technologies, which
drastically change your strategies for playing with each. The way you play as the Torians will differ
A LOT from how you play as the Terrans.
Bear in mind that you need the Dark Avatar expansion before installing Twilight of the Arnor.
3. Am I able to research a full Tech-Tree automatically ?
Not sure what you mean here. If you're asking if you can queue research so that you can research Shields I, II, III and IV one after the other automatically, no you can't. And typically, you wouldn't want to either. A lot of the tech paths are LONG.
If you have any other questions, ASK! This community is very helpful.
