rather then dig through countless pages after pages... I decided to take the lazy way out and just make this thread
so... if it is posted somewhere else on some tutorial... sorry, but I figured this may help a bit, especially if it isn't...
now then, from here on, I am assuming that you know what each button does and such... so if you are asking... 'extend mothership... what's that mean?' chances are you need to take a step back... find out... then come back... and have a decent amount of ship designs (basically... you already know what's up and what's down)
now that that's outta the way, here goes: (this is what I normally do to start off a round, no laughing
)
1: first off, you need to build up your mothership... to do this, wait till you get to full 3k turns, then use 2k on extending mothership all at once, this should net you 3k-4k good segments. after this, go to your mothership build section, and start building workshops. the best way to do this is build as many workshops as possible, going 1 turn at a time (if however, it is a build rate of 1.5 build 3 workshops to make use of the extra 0.5 build rate) keep doing this until you get to 300 (or more, depending on build rate, don't waste your turn on building less then the build rate) after this, put all the rest of the segments into biofarms, about 300-400 at a time. if you build them all at once, you get 0 income from the biofarms until the next turns you use, so this way you get credits from what you have already built halfway through. for gold members, wait till your at 5k, use 3k turns on extend, then go from there.
2: at the end of all this, depending on how many turns you put into it (after 5k turns I had a decent 83 mil... not sure what I had when using 3k) build up about 2-3 fleets of 1 ship, as big as you can (minimum for these ships should be 3mil attack and 3 mil hp... not sure on sheild and accuracy, go crazy with that) go and do galaxy missions. after you get to 2%, you may start having trouble doing missions, so bigger then just 3mil stat ships may be good... but if you can do those, you will be getting 1-2 mil in reward, plus items that may be good for another 1-2 mil.
3: if your ships have been surviving 2% missions... go to the bounty area and bounty someone
try to get as low a fleet power person as possible... if you succeed, you get 100k experience and 10mil (or more) credits... enough to bump you up to lvl 7 in commander lvl. use the newfound CP's to boost your sheild rate first off... then you can either save for the next sheild point (for me it was 3rd) or get another one (personally, I would go for hp boost, if not sheild)
4: now with your new lvl comes bigger mothership contracts... for me, this meant lvl 1 missions gave out about 700k a mission... which just so happens to be about what I can do to... sof rom here on, you can go on with galaxy missions (they get better, at least I hope so...) or lvl 1-2 mothership contracts... or you feel lucky, try your hand at bounties again... however if you do go bounties, be careful with mothership contracts... don't do mothership contracts any higher then you would do in galaxy.
as a side note, I had cost calc on the entire time... sometimes lowering reward as much as half, but in the time encountered tinyman ships (almost the entire reason for cost calc for those who don't know... ships designed to use enormous credits instead of big hulls, leading to high stats and 1/3rd the power) at least 3-4 times.
soo... questions? comments? feel free to jab away or add them to your own tutorials if you want ;)