This guide is orientated at complete noobs at Ogame. If you are not one, still feel welcome to read my opinion on how to start an account.  Most things described in the FAQ or Tips will be described here.

Starting Ogame:

When you create an account, you start off with one planet (163 fields), 500 metal, 500 crystal, and 0 points. The planet has nothing else, that means no buildings, nothing researched, and no defences. Each field can hold one level of a building. This means, that in your main (first) planet, you can have a level 100 metal mine and a level 63 solar plant (it's just an example, don't try it.) 

Once you have built a building, it is there forever unless you demolish it. Demolishing a building level costs half the cost of building the building level, and will lose you points. For every1000 resources you spend you will gain a point.

If you haven't already, build a metal mine now. If you have nothing, you will only gain 20 metal an hour. Same goes for crystal, except you only gain 10 an hour. However, having a high level metal mine does not instantly warrant a return of 1000000000 metal an hour. To produce the metal, energy is needed. This can be gotten via 4 ways. The first is through a solar plant. Build one now (your metal mine should have finished). Otherwise, you will be able to have a fusion plant, accessable after a level 5 deut synthesizer, solar satellites, or lunar bases (only available on moons)

If you do not have enough energy to account for your mines and synthesizer, Ogame will try to even everything out. This means that instead of getting no metal and all your crystal, Ogame will make it so you get half metal and half crystal or something. However, if you want to you can choose to only produce metal at a 40% rate so you can earn more crystal.

Right now you should try to keep your metal mines, crystal mines, and solar plant the same level. It is organized so that if you have no deut synthesizer and the crystal and metal mines are the same level, a solar plant of the same level will account for all the energy needed. Later you will be able to make solar satellites so that you will not need to waste fields.

 When your buildings are at a higher level, not only will the cost increase but the time to build will increase too. Metal mines increase in cost by 50% per level while crystal mines increase by 100% per level. This means that in the future your metal mines will generally be a higher level than your crystal mines.

 When your mines and plant are level 5, build a deut synthesizer. You can get this to a slightly higher level but it isn't completely neccessary at this stage. The only thing that you'd want it for is a Robotic Factory. The formula to calculate building time is (2^[building level])/([robotic factory level]+1). This means that if you increase the level of you robotic factory building time will decrease.

 Soon you will be able to build levels of research lab, and

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Suggestions, comments, and corrections are welcome, leave me a PM on idb or post on the Ogame thread. Keep in mind that I'm hopeless at writing things :)