FreeOrion

hi
i really got problems to play the game.
regardless what i do, at some point of the game my population is screwed.
at first i fell in the newb trap and researched everything that was 1rp/1turn(does this bioterr research anything else than screwing up the game? please, place it far far faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar to the right of the tree).
then i thought im fit for a new round and tried to fly around with my fleet to find a new secons planet for my people.
bad idea, the planet was colonized and my home planet was cut to an half, population-wise.
i had the second planet a whole turn before they starved away :S

a "firsts steps" guide would be very good.
something like "start you journey to victory by researching population enhancing techs(or whatever) and do this, its better at the beginning of the game to do that..." and so on...

edit:
i got my homeplanet to a pop of 1 after 6 turns, thats my fastest match till now but i think i can make it even faster...
the target of the game IS that you kill your pop in a most efficient way, isnt it? o.0

Thanks for the feedback. A couple things to note, though...

FreeOrion is still in development and isn't meant to be a playble, finished game yet. Nothing is balanced (like all the 1 RP/1 turn techs) and isn't intended to be.

That said, your population shouldn't be suddenly falling by half just because you colonized another planet. This actually sounds a lot like the infamous "food bug" that was in previous versions... What version of the installer did you download? The latest in v0.3.1-RC7, which shouldn't have this issue.

Are you sure it was colonizing that caused the drop, and not changing your homeworld's focus so that you ran out of food?

Additionally, if you are using an earlier version, there was a tech called "Test Tech" which did cause massive population loss the turn after being researched. It was, I think, removed from RC7 (though I'm not certain of this). If it's there, then don't research it, and make sure to read tech descriptions before reading them, as this was was meant for testing purposes, and shouldn't be researched if you were trying to actually play the game.

There is a quick play guide for version 0.3 on the wiki, although this is rather out of date now. I'll probably write up another one for v0.4, but it's too time consuming to keep it up to date for every release.

okay, so it WAS the test tech.
i only got the rc6 in my repro because it is static build(my own builds failed for me)
the research of the test tech was about at the time when the drop came, so it is indeed my fault... again^^
the guide you meant only pointed at how to control the game, not how to play, maybe im wrong but that's IMHO a difference.

Yes, true...

However again, we're not focusing on making FreeOrion playable at this stage. The releases primarily allow new people to check out what's been done, and keep the non-compiling design and content-creating community somewhat up-to-date with the code progress.

As such, a detailed strategy guide is a bit premature, although a brief one would be useful, if someone would like to write it...