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My appologies if my english is wrong or hard to follow, I'm Dutch. 
Feel free to correct me.
Hi The Lacunca Expanse player,
I'm Rammo and this guide is about the things I think new players need to know about The Expanse:
The Lacuna Expase is a time-based Space game. Waiting for buildings to complete and for resources to fill up are the basic idea of any time based game.
In this game there are 22 types of Food and 20 types of Ore, we also have Water and Energy as main resources. Most buildings have both a cost to build and a cost to maintain. You need only three food types to avoid unhappiness effects. Your Planetary Command Centre produces algae already, so two others will be needed on every planet.
Another resource in this game is Essentia, commonly refered to as "E", there is no hourly income on this resource, you can win some in the lottery every day (lottery is in the Entertainment District). The lottery is based on zones (every player starts in zone 0|0, so it can be hard to win for a new player. There is only one win in every zone per day). Later on you can get an Essentia Vein (generating 4e every day), but that's a rare building and you have to beat an AI for that, so it's not realy for starters. Another way to get e is to buy it. At the top of the screen you see a number (the amount of E you have rounded to a whole number). If you click on the symbol to the left of it you will see two tabs: Boosts and Get More Essentia. Here you can buy 'E'.
Still 2 resources I want to talk about, Waste and Happiness. Waste is a resource you can produce easily, but if you have more waste than you can store it will cost happiness. In the lower levels you will find waste a very nasty thing. Later on you will need it from time to time. Happiness is needed to get yourself a new plannet. The amount you need can be looked up in the Planetary Command Center, or PPC (We bigger players use abbreviations to keep chat running faster 
). It can be found under the "Planet" tab.
Negative happiness increases the build time and work time for everything on the planet by 1% for every 1,000 negative happiness. The only exception to this is glyph buildings. The Essentia cost of rushing a building in the Construction Ministry does not increase if a planet is unhappy.
The first thing you have to do if you start playing the game is to finish the tutorial. It's important that you dont spend all the essentia you get during the tutorial. if you did not get a message that a mission was completed just hit F5 (refresh) or log out/in again.
The reason for this is the fact that bigger players can sell plans after the tutorial, but only if you have E left. The buildings you will get from the plans (called a Newbie Package/Starter Package) are Glyph buildings. They generate a lot of the resources like Food (mulitple buildings) Ore (volcano) Water (Natural Spring) and Energy (Geo Thermal Vent). Some people also include an Interdimensional Rift (storage) and a Kalavian Ruins (Happiness).
what else do you need to know?
It's a good idea to ask players for help, like when you can't finish a Lost City of Tyleon. There is a high demand on plans you can get at the lower levels as almost nobody can make them (most just level the university up and some missions are only available on the lower levels!!)
Taking over a planet:
If you are going to get a new planet look around, there are differend kinds of planets, all with differend amounts of ore and water. The amount of plots on a planet is the amount of normal buildings you can put there. Glyph buildings dont take up a plot.
Other things to say for now are that you have to look at the orbit your planet is in. When you started this game you selected Habitable Orbits, if you forget your Habitable Orbits, you can ask me to look them up for you look for somone else to find them for you, i wont help with that!!, just dont ask it right after the creation of your account as it may not be in my Library yet. If you try to colonize a planet that is not in your Habitable Orbits, you get -1 plots, you can build a terraform platform to get it positive again, but they make a lot of waste and require University level 18.
You need the right amount of happiness to take over a planet (see PCC tab Planet) for the first planet it is 100k (100.000). to claim a planet you send a (short range) colony ship to it, when it arives it will create a new colony for you. It's also important that there are no other players in the same star system as your planet because players can have Shield Against Weapons (SAWS) that shoot down your ship(s).
Alliance:
There are serveral reasons to be in an alliance, like protection and getting better prices for a trade. One other thing is the Stash.
Alliance stash use: Most simply use it to instantly transport resources between their own colonies. It is "hidden" in the embassy building. If you need something for a mission, you can ask alliance members if they have something available. You can ask in chat or by using mail (addressed to @ally for everyone in your alliance).
Trade:
You can trade with multple buildings in the expanse. Most used are the Trade Ministry (TM) and the Subspace Transporter (SST). Trades in the SST arrive instantly but the trade but costs 1e to post and the price+1e to buy from. It's most commenly used for halls and the high amounts of glyphs. TM trades have a travel time and the seller needs to have a ship. The ship and the distance determines the travel time. To put somthing up to trade, you select the building and go to the ADD TRADE tab. You select what you want to trade, hit the + sign next to it and the amount of e you want for it. (in TM you can also select the ship to use; fast ships arrive sooner and are apprecated by the buyer, but dont aways have the ablity to carry large amounts of stuff).
Push:
This is trading to yourself :P. in the SST it will cost you 2e, In TM this is free. You have to select the planet you want to trade to instead of the price. But for the rest of it, it's the same as trading.
Mercenaries Guild (MG):
The last trade building, only used for trading spies. It costs 3e (-0.1e for every level of the MG) to post a trade. At level 10 you need 2e to sell, at level 30 it is free.
Shield Against Weapons (SAW)
The Shield Against Weapons (SAW) is a defence system that shoots down incoming ships. It attacks before other defensive measures such as drones and fighters. SAWs also help you defend your allies, as long as they're in the same star system as you. If an enemy ship is incoming to any world in a star system, then all planets will fire their SAW's at the incoming enemy ship(s).
Any non-alliance combat ship is considered an enemy ship by the SAWs. This means that a non-alliance colony-ship will be considered an enemy ship and will be shot down. Fighters sent to defend a body will not be shot down as they are not an attack.
Trade ships and spy delivery ships are not considered targets by SAWs. You are limited to Ten SAWs per planet. If you have multiple planets in the same system with multiple SAWs per planet, this is sometimes called a "SAW Ring", or a "Ring of Fire" (ROF). This provides the best automated defense setup you can get.
there are a couple types of plans in this game,
x can be any number between 1 and 30
Glyph plans are plans for buildings that are a little better than normal buildings. A level 1 glyph building is about as good as a level 11 normal building. You cant build these buildings without the plans, but on some planets they are already there. You can build the glyph building plans in your Archeology Ministry (ArchMin or AM) by combing glyph's. To upgrade a glyph buildings you need halls of vrbansk. you can make them from glyphs as well.
Non-glyph buildings are the regular buildings, you cant make them from glyph's.
Level 1 plans: used to build a building till its first level.
level x plans: like a Junk Henge Sculpture (6) plan, can upgrade a level 5 Junk Henge Sculpture, but it wont build the building if you dont have the building, and it wont level up a level 4 Junk Henge Sculpture, only a level 5.
level 1+x plans, like a Volcano (1+4) plan will build a building (in this case a Volcano) and then start to upgrade it by x levels. In this case you get a level 5 building in the end.
1 beach 5 (1+6) means it is 1 plan from beach type 5 and level 7(1+6=7), there are 13 types of beach. As they are decoration the most common use for them is to wait for a mission that needs them, instead of really building one.
Halls can upgrade Glyph buildings, you build one hall on the planet, (wait to the building is build) than go the sacrafice tab, select the building and hit the sacrafice button. remember, even if you only build one hall it will cost you halls of the level you build to. so if you upgrade a level 4 to a level 5, it will cost you 5 halls. it will take 5 halls from your invetory. But if you have 4 halls in the inventory, the building on the planet will be sacrificed (so are the other 4 from the inventory).
try not to buy Gas Giant or Terraform platforms if you dont need them. They can make a lot of waste, and as I already said waste can lower happiness.
You build your ships in the Shipyard (you need a Space Port first), and control them through the Space Port and the star map. However, you'll need lots of different buildings to build each ship type.
ships will change over time look here to see what is going to happen.
All ship types have attributes, It depends on the ship and some of the buildings on your planet what the numbers on the ships you can build are. Bigger players can usually build bigger ships for you.
some links:
New player guide made by UF
link to the admins of the game:
That is it for now, more may come. :D
Last update: stopped looking for orbits.
Keywords: Starting guide by Rammo New Player
