I’m new to Aurora 4X and want to know which guides are best for beginners? Feel free to share some general tips for the game as well.
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Welcome aboard!
It’d say Defran Strategy on youtube has great videos, both guides and playthroughs; worked for me. Enter Elysium has also older playhrough that neatly eases new player into the game, but some things there won’t be up to date.
Other than that, i’d say just go and play, and don’t worry about messing up, noone here knows everything 
. If you don’t know something, ask about in a forum, or browse around.
As a tip - you can try to make a story about your playthrough, for many it’s the most fun part.
I can’t say what the best way is (I don’t learn well from Video for example), but I can say what I do.
A lot of reading. And I never try to learn about the whole game.
I try to learn single topics. In time the bigger picture emerges.
In the game itself there are tooltips and descriptions.
The patch notes and changelogs are worthwhile as well. Steve has a way with words so you need to read very carefully and examine every word. Otherwise layers of meaning will escape you.
If you take the time to fully understand what is being said however, you will be amply rewarded.
Here on this forum you have a lot of experienced players who are happy to share and help out anybody who took the time to formulate a coherent question. Steve himself among them.
Miey already mentioned the campaign reports and I second that. Reading those will give you a sense of what people get up to and how the game reacts.
Another place to learn the game is in the suggestions category. Sometimes people want to have things implemented (which could give you ideas on how to proceed in your own game) and then one of the veterans comes out and tells them how the game already allows for the request and exactly how one has to go about doing it.
The spacemaster tool is Aurora’s built in “cheat suite”.
It is also a great learning tool, that allows you to set up a situation that involves your question and play it out.
Then you go back to your savegames, change some details and watch what changes.
As a final note - keep in mind that Steve is working on Aurora for something like 25 years now.
There is history there. Unearthing it is part of what keeps me coming back.
Videos are nice, but for me, the best way is to just play! Ask questions here on the forum. Don’t be afraid to make lots of mistakes. It’s easy to just start a new game incorporating the lessons you have learned!
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It is a matter of taste but depending on what you enjoy you may find using Space master to help build ships or explore or starting with a lower enemy spawn rate and more minerals is a way to start playing with the game being easier.
Don’t even try to ask the AI for advice. In most cases, the AI is wrong.
In my opinion, the best way to learn is to try something yourself. There is no multiplayer or competitive elements, and besides, the game does not force you to act as efficiently as possible. You can play as you like. There is no wrong way here.
Enjoy exploring. 
And if you have Raiders or NPR enabled, don’t forget to build at least a couple of missile satellites or some STO.
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My perspective, as somebody who is still learning, is to try and take it ‘seriously’.
By that I mean - make every decision you’re making conscious. When you’re planning what to build, and what percentages, try to consider alternatives. If you find yourself on a kind of autopilot, just doing whatever or letting time pass, you’re not learning and probably missing something.
I’ve tried to describe the process a bit in my campaign ( The Trial: Campaign ) and the associated “lessons learned” thread ( The Trial: Lessons Learned ).
I don’t think I have captured the attitude shift that is best for this game that I think other games don’t expect, however. The game requires you to meet it halfway - to care about why you are building construction facilities, why colonise there. Once I find an elegant way to describe it, I will try to, but it is a fractal game, a moving target for your concentration where detail only begets more detail. And that’s beautiful.
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Astonishingly useful analogy. Thanks for that.
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For me Aurora 4x really clicked when it became a game about goals and then playing towards it. Because the galaxy out there is unknown, the goals are usually short-to-medium term. My short term goals usually tend to be something like introduce a new ship class, rotate a task force for an upgrade, or build up a ground presense on an outlying colony. The medium term goals tend to be industrial and logistical focused, though honestly I spend far more time preparing for an offensive than I actually do ever fighting one. This game requires a bit of a perspective shift in that something I am doing right now might not actually come to fruition for a real life week or so.
As for the rest of the device, videos and the wiki are GREAT tools and despite the fact I have been playing since 2011, I occasionally still do refer back to them because I tend to take 6-12 month breaks from A4X between patches. But honestly, the best lessons for me are just playing the game and butting my head up against a problem. This program has some idiosyncrasies that made sense to the developer but not necessarily to me and the only way I’ve manage to learn how to deal with them is by going through a period of frustration until I figured it out. That isn’t a dig on Steve, it is just you learn that this game has a particular let of logic and part of the charm - if that is your thing - is figuring out how things work.
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I learned by trying to play along with some Let’s Play videos. I had to pause and rewind a lot from the start. But I everything I needed to know was in there. Then I forgot / mis-remembered some things, and had to re-watch some parts. Reading the “Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread” and browsing through the “Player Questions” sections here while on the jon has also been very helpful.
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as a fairly new player, I did two things - first I watched a couple of playthroughs just to get an idea of the game. Afterwards, i fed the manual to Claude and reffered him to the forums, and as i played I asked him many questions. Most answers were pretty good and eased me into playing and learning the many mechanics. But the more I played the more it clicked, you know?
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