Hi Guys I'm new to stellaris, any tips advice please? (it's downloading now)

Play with tutorial on and try to finish your first game. You will learn a lot if you play until the end game crisis.

It's a little confusing what I'm supposed to do? do I just build ships and add send them off to explore? it mentioned about sending a ship through a hyperspace lane?

goto the gog twitch and watch Darksaber2k play for a few hours

Hi good people of Gog,
I'm partway through my first game. (The upgrade came as I was just learning the ropes with the previous version).
At the moment I'm 'surrounded' by two empires who seem intent on gobbling up all the available star systems (thats my role). I've also run into a shortage of energy,
Two questions, on a planet do I need to have food production going to feed my pops, or can I rely on food being supplied from my other planets? Thus allowing me to build more generator blocks?
Second question how treacharous are other empires?, i.e.If we have a non-aggression pact, how easy is it for them to renege on it, leaving me hung out to dry?
BTW, both other empires are larger than mine and rated superior!
Just a comment, the planetary surface options could be a little clearer, i.e. districts, how many are necessry......?

I shall carry on to the bitter end regardless. It will interesting to see if this is a temporary slump, or will mankind triumph in the end...?

the humans have already lost but yes by all means see it out to the bitter end

1. any one shortage is fine for a while but best results are got from keeping all things in the +

2. yes... an empire needs food and doesn't care where it came from but everything needs to goto your capital and a lot of bad things could happen before it gets there... every time you sell ore the price drops a bit and everytime you pay for food is pushing the price up but food is also an easy thing to make that everyone wants

3. very a race has traits that say how much they think like you do but sooner or later they will want a fresh batch of orion slaves and your women look ok once they paint them green... you need to keep being pals and to get above 50 = you need diplomatic skills to point out how pretty some other race looks i.e, that slug thing is already green guys

4A. how big is the planet? a small planet only needs one city
4B, does the planet have any special things? i.e, extra power or trade options... as a rule of thumb a planet that just does [food, power or ore] is better than trying to do all three but special productions like gas | gems should be added sparingly
ime research and refined ore (2 each) work best at my capital which also acts as my main shipyard
4C remember that districts are only temporary so slap a few down as a stop gap until your population needs more homes it is fine to have the extra farms | power stations then rebuild them as cities later

My Drack holly union* rule earth so crime isn't a big issue for me but - homes = + crime for most races and unemployment is the other big crime maker so once your planet runs out of homes | room | jobs the three basic options are;
build police, ship the unwashed off some place or watch them kill each other in riots

* my race of humanoid dragons that settled on earth when their own planet died and the humans now worthship them as gods

Thanks for taking the time. Will consider your suggestions as I go down fighting, lol.

Yes. In fact, it's optimal to specialize your planets. If you have a non-aggression pact there is a grace period where they cannot declare war, so you will get a warning. If you're playing on any difficulty setting other than the lowest this is typical; the AI gets a huge resource advantage, and it liquidates it on the market to buy massive amounts of alloys to build absurdly large fleets (this also jacks up the price of alloys on the market to similarly absurd levels, meaning you can make a killing by just pumping out alloys and selling them). You want the number of available jobs to be slightly higher than the number of current pops. If you have fewer jobs than pops you'll have unemployed people which bring crime and instability, and if you have more jobs than pops then you wasted minerals on upgrades that aren'