I am brand new to the game, and so far I'm quite impressed.  This is my first shot with a space based RTS or any modern game of this type.  In the past I've been a Starcraft / C&C fan, but the limits in unit production and scope of the battlefield led me here.

What I'm finding though, is that learning how to play Sins is a very slow process.  The tutorials built-in are very weak and all I can find out there for tutorials are youtube videos that are filled with "um, yeah, here is where you make ships".  This I know... but in order to make a ship of a certain type there are 15 steps before that.  I've sorted out some of them, but it's a slow process.  Any help on that would be great.

Back to why I'm here though.  I'm having a very hard time playing the built-in maps because the pirates are on a continual raid.  I pay them off now and then, but with little money to keep up, I end up getting attacked anyway before I can learn what to build and get a force up.  So I built a custom map (inside the game) and thought I made a basic 2 player map with random everything except NO pirates.  Upon load with myself and one computer player I get an instand win.

I added a third player, and one player dies right away, and the game goes on, but I'm unsure if the other play is going to play right because of the problems so far.

All I want to do is play a basic 1 on 1 map to learn the basic mechanics, and I can't get it done so far.

Secondly, I tried the galaxy forge.  I created a very basic map, saved it into my galaxy folder, and it does not show up in game.

Nothing I'm trying is working... what am I missing?