These questions are often asked by players completely new to the game.

Who am I?
Where am I?
When is the game set?
Where do I start?
Tell me about my ship
Where can I go?
When do I start paying?
What can I fight and where?
How do I get more ships?
How do I create my own empire?

You are in control of a ship. You are a training position labeled TRN and are not yet part of an affiliation. An affiliation is a faction within the Peripheries. This faction may be human or may be an alien species. You will get the option to join an affiliation after you have looked at the choices available to you. You can do some training missions to get used to the game or if you are a returning player you can skip this stage and join an affiliation straight away.

You start the game landed on a planet in the Agripeta system in the Halo star cluster (called a Periphery). The Halo Periphery is geared towards new players. The larger factions keep out, giving you the opportunity to learn the game in relatively safety. Faster than light travel is possible, i.e. ships can move between stars using engines known as jump drives. They move the ship directly from the region of space close to one star to the region of space close to the destination star. There is a network of roots that forms the map of the stars.

The setting is a few hundred years from now. Humanity has fractured into various groups and has encountered alien races. Each species of alien has its unique history and while some have interacted with others for hundreds of years, humans generally have not had dealings with aliens for more than a few decades.

As well as training missions that will take you through the Halo Periphery, you can issue orders for your ship in order to get a feel for the game. It is best to start simply by getting used to doing simple orders. Use the ‘move to planet orbit’ in order to move your ship from its current location to that of another planet. ‘Scan planet’ order can be used to get maps. Scans of planets can only be done from orbit. You can issue ‘detailed scan’ in order to look more closely at other positions (ships, starbases etc) that you have detected during your journeys. Do not leave the Halo Periphery unless you know where you are going. It is a hostile universe so jumping into the wrong system could prove disastrous. Another top tip is to contact other players by a simple 'hi' in the recruitment forum. Simply writing to anyone and everyone can often pay dividends. The game is a very social one so knowing players is often half the fun.

You start the game with a choice of three ships, courier, surveyor and hauler. They are effectively the 1.1 litre engine of the Phoenix universe. They are good ships to get you going. You will have the opportunity to get all three by completing missions. They are fairly small, having only 50 hulls. By way of comparison most human ships are approximately 100 hulls although often the purpose of the ship defines the size. The hull strength determines the damage that a hull can withstand so the size multiplied by the hull strength determines the maximum damage a ship can withstand. Your ship has a number of installed items that determine its capabilities. You can find out about many items by looking in the game data available in the menu.

Anywhere you know about. A better question however is where should I go. The answer to this should be determined with some conversions between yourself and the rest of your affiliation. Charging off in a random direction is likely to end in destruction. There are maps of the peripheries out there and some even label which affiliation claims domain of which system. This can be very helpful. If you want to sell your initial cargo, it is best to do so to your own affiliation or to one of its allies. This is just starting advice and once you know the game better you will know where to trade and with whom.Your affiliation may also have some survey work lined up. There is never a shortage of worlds to check over.

You can play the game for free as long as you never perform special actions, surface explorations and want to run positions other than ships and ground parties. While you do not have a political position, each position that you own has its own stellars (money) rather than a central account. KJC’s advice is to learn the game a little better, do some trading or scanning then, if you want to go further, set up a political account.

To begin with it is best to avoid trouble as your starting ships are simply not up to it. You could try a bit of Privateering against Halo Tramp Haulers as these are controlled by the game. If you are serious about getting into trouble, you shouldn't be needing to read this FAQ!

There are number of ways of getting more ships. The standard routes are Create Political Position and beg your affiliation. The simplest one is to start a political position using the Create Political Position order in the editor or follow the Create Political Mission (note that this means that you will become a paying customer). Using the order automatically generates 5 more ships for you. They are a mixture of explorers, cruisers and freighters. The second method is to beg your affiliation for more ships. This will largely depend on how well you get on with your affiliation. It is often the case that they have a few spare ships laying around that they could transfer.

While a frequently asked question, it is quite an advanced one and requires good understanding of the game. Yes it can be done, this said, most players that initially want to go down this road often end up controlling an already established affiliation.There are two methods of carving a niche for yourself in the Peripheries. The first method is to create your own affiliation from scratch while the second is to take over where somebody else left off.

Creating your own affiliation can be achieved by leaving an affiliation and taking all your assets with you providing you have 1 million stellars in your political account. Once you are independent, you issue a special action declaring your new affiliation, i.e. giving it a name and a three-letter acronym. An example would be Periphery Defence Force (PDF). The Game Master will then put this data into the game and promote your political to a Periphery Director.

Alternatively should you bump into a faction within the game that are not represented by an affiliation, you can leave your affiliation and use a special action to become the representatives of the faction you have found. For example, a player finds an isolated world populated by a technologically advanced group of humans that apparently ended up there some decades ago by accident. The player issues a special action and declares that he will represent these people in the game from this point onwards. Note that there are often consequences to these sorts of actions.

As stated above, more commonly a player can take over an established affiliation. From time to time the real world interferes with the game and players have to leave. As a consequence a small faction such as either of the ones mentioned above becomes uncontrolled. Presuming that you know of this (through rumours, talking with players etc), you can ask to take over the affiliation. All assets will be transferred to your control.