New to SoaSE and RTS games

If you're completely new, try the tutorial.

I'm new to this game too (and haven't played much RTS before either). After playing through the tutorials, I'd start with a small scenario with one or maybe two AI opponents on easy. That way, you (hopefully) won't have to many ships or planets to manage at first. Then just keep building different ships and structures, trying to find out what they're good for, fend off enemy attacks and as soon as you have a decent fleet together, try to initiate some of your own.

BTW I think the user interface of this game is excellent, you can get practically all the information you need just by mousing over stuff

These sorts of games always have a big learning curve. So start small, and expect to get wasted by the AI for the first few games. Start on easy, low numbers of enemies, low numbers of phase lanes. Learn from your mistakes. When you come up short on something, go looking for what might have provided it better and faster.

Before you do anything major, save. If you get your behind handed to you, reload the save and do it a different way. Then do it again. If you still cant find a good way of doing it, learn from it and start a new game and dont repeat some of the mistakes you made that time.

Everything costs money, metal and crystal. So you need to figure out how to balance them, to allow you to do what you want when you want to, without wasting them on things you dont need yet.

A lot of the learning is in trying things to see what works best, and figuring out what you did that was really a mistake when you did it, so that next time you spend the resources more wisely.

Its not a game about just kicking *rse, to have that fleet, you need to be able to generate the resources to build it and then enhance it. So the game is as much about strategy as it is about combat tactics.

There've been some good suggestions already. I'll definitely echo doing the tutorials, and then starting on a small map with 1 or 2 easy AI. I would also disable pirates, a lot of new players find it too stressful/hard when they're trying to learn how to play the game and have to worry about attacks from both AI and pirates.

The basic management can be explained somewhat simply:

Planets make money. They have asteroids around them for ore and crystal. Ore is a primary building material, crystal is a primary research material (in general). You can build everything by selecting the planet. Each planet spawns its own construction ships that you don't need to worry about controlling, just select the buildings, place them in the grav well, and it'll do the rest.

Planets also have upgrades. Very important is the infrastructure/population upgrade. All new colonies start with a negative credit income (they drain the amount of credits you make) because they're underdeveloped. Upgrade their population as soon as possible (as a rule of thumb, I never colonize unless I can afford to bring them out of the negative immediately). You can also upgrade their HP (to survive bombing longer), logistic/tactical slots (for more buildings in their grav wells), and explore them to find hidden bonuses and artifacts.

You could do what i always do when i play new RTS or RT4X in this case.

Start with a small map to play with 2 AI.One as enemy and one as your ally.Then,let the ai use the same race as you,so that you can see what the ai build or how they play the game in case you are "lost".It's more like having a reference for you to learn.

It works for me in any RTS and makes the learning curve less steep.