Armada 2525 is the space version of risk but with much more gameplay options. You begin humbly enough in a corner of the galaxy on one planet. Then, you build industries and do research into new technologies. As you advance in technology and build your production capabilities you will be able to build increasingly sophisticated starships and go out and explore and conquer new planets and begin the process there as well. But beware, there are computer players who are doing the same thing and eventually hostilities will result as you encounter these other players.
Winning can take several strategies but one of my favorites is to expand into new weapons and ship technology quickly and try to develop a technologically superior fleet. Another key is not to expand too aggressively as this will tax your ability to defend your territories and limit your ability to go after enemy planets and fleets.
You should also try to keep you fleet concentrated near the "front" or near obvious starlanes that the other players may transit. In addition, don't declare war on more than one player at a time if you can help it. For more challenging games the computer player characteristics can be changed in level of difficulty and also behavior. For example, in addition to the standard easy to hard scale you can also have
the computer player’s behaviors range from pacifists to war mongers.
Additional advice is to only colonize planets that have the ability to support large levels of resources or population. These will be planets associated with yellow stars similar to our sun. Planet sizes range from small to large indicating how many people can ultimately inhabit there.
You also want to go after "terran" worlds because their atmosphere is most like earth's and will allow for rapid population growth. Even asteroid like worlds can be colonized later as you gain technology to terraform these uninhabitable spaces. However, I find the resources required to gain this technology to be wasteful and better spent in developing military technology. The growth of such terraformed worlds is also too slow to be of value once they are colonized. Whatever strategy you choose, I'm sure you'll have hours of fun playing Armada 2525.
