Am a total new player and feeling a bit overwhelmed even though I have watched a few lets plays and have been through all the tutorials.

So I also ask what to focus on early? 

Many thanks will write some this down and practise against bots

You aren't going to like hearing this, but slow expansion will generally be the death of you...yes, the TEC Loyalists are the best at turtling, but even they don't have the vertical growth potential to contend with larger empires, especially early and mid-game...

I find that for most people (myself included), their lack of confidence when they are learning a new game leads them into an overly cautious mindset...this is bad, it will actually make the game harder, not easier...if you play on a 1v1 map against an easy or normal AI (pirates OFF), you should be able to get 6 or so planets with impunity (ie you don't have to worry about the AI attacking you)...

The best thing you can do is just try to expand quickly...don't start turtling, it'll get you into bad habits and make your life more difficult...I know it sounds counter intuitive but it's true...

I'd lead off with an akkan capital ship and pick the colonize ability...a decent fleet of cobalts and corvettes should be a good starting fleet for wiping out militias...cobalts will kill the gardas (which are bad for your corvettes) while corvettes can kill everything else the militia have)....just grab 5-7 planets as fast as possible, and don't ignore extractors that can be captured (the ones in uncolonizable gravity wells like gas giants, asteroid belts, etc.)...probably 2-4 colony frigates will be needed depending on the number of neutrals and how you expand....

The biggest challenge is getting the logistics of expansion down...ideally, you're colony ships will jump in right after the krosov militia units are killed, and you'll have enough colony ships so that you don't waste time sitting around waiting for one of them to recharge the antimatter needed to colonize...

Ah ok

Well at the moment am just getting to grips with what to build first and what the tech trees can do, I will try and get a few planets ASAP at the start.

This is correct, but I'd like to emphasize that the first two population upgrades are critical. Without those, the underdevelopment fees will murder your economy.

As you're a new player, you could always use the pause button while playing against AI. It's the actual 'pause/break' button on your keyboard. Pause the game when you need to and have a think about what you want to do before un-pausing. You can do a few things while paused, look around, select things to be build e.t.c., nothing will happen until you un-pause though.

I would recommend looking through your different tech tree's and having a think about what your general strategy wants to be. Do you want to play defensively? Offensively? Economy centric? caster/ability focused or mass attack strength offensive? e.t.c. e.t.c. e.t.c. Think about this stuff, and have a look at tech skills and what they do, see which tech prerequisites are required for certain buildings central to certain play styles (culture/trade/ship type/ship ability e.t.c.). Take note of the civ/mil research buildings required for said tech and cross reference that with the logistical capabilities of planets within your sight so far. You can get this information from the info cards when you hover over planets (or anything else).

You can judge fairly well how efficient a given build order will be considering the margin of deviation regarding metal/crystal/civ/mil capabilities that you've got in a given match up. After a while you can feel out what the best idea would be given what you've got available.

Given all that, it's usually best to begin a certain way no matter what you're going to be doing later on. equivalent to the very early build order stuff in games like starcraft 2.

I play vasari, so I wouldn't know about other races as such, but this is what I do: Build a Cap Ship Factory then set an Egg (vas cap ship capable of colonizing planets) to build, 2/3 Scout ships (depending on how many branches from my first planet) when they're built CTRL-Q them to set them to auto explore,  2 mil research buildings, Colony ship (That'll give me 2 branches of possible colony). Research corvette. Hotkey frigate factory to 4, set it's destination to Colony ship once it's built. Hot Key Cap Ship to 1 and Shift-F it to add a fleet marker to it, and hotkey colony frig to 5 shift-F it aswell.

At this point you should have gotten sight of the first few planets, send your cap ship to the one with the most pirates, send the colony frig to a planet with 2 or 3 pirates and head straight to the planet/asteroid to colonize it. With your cap ship take out the ships that can attack the planet, then colonize it, then take out the rest of the pirates. With colony ship colonize the asteroid/planet and immediately build a defense structure while keeping the colony ship close enough to the ship that would agro the planet instead agro-ing the colony ship while the defensive structure builds, once it's built send the colony ship back to your capital.

By this time you should have begun to build 4 or 5 corvettes by simply hitting '4'-'d' then 's' a couple of times, they'll automatically fly to the colony ship and join it's fleet, send the cap ship further down the route to the next planet and repeat the process, colonizing and taking out the pirates. while doing this, stop building ships once you have 4 or 5 and upgrade the planet populations and build the resource extractors asap. Place 2 civ research buildings where appropriate and research the arctic/volcanic colonization abilities, whichever is needed and then the terran population upgrade.

The Idea is to colonize and upgrade your income capabilities asap while teching to maximize income. The more you colonize the faster your income will be, the faster your income, the bigger you can become quicker, it's an exponential process where-in the idea is to gain a momentum and increase that momentum throughout the match.

after a while you will begin to get a feel for the balance between adding to your army and teching, regarding infastructure/economy and warfare tech, and after that you can begin to worry about unit counters, choke points and general strategy.

There will come a point where you come up to another empire's 'front line' at which point heavily fortify the planets next to that front line and keep your army near those points. Space Stations are a great way of fortifying entry points to your empire, the idea is to asses where those 'entry points' are and heavily defend them, keeping ships poking in to judge unit composition and army size. Scouts are great for this.

A large brunt of the game now will be a lot of too and fro-ing between the planets on the front line trying to overpower the enemies army and defending your own front line, here is the arena for a lot of the clever strategies, pincers, dummy attacks, decoys and so on, this is advanced stuff so I'll not go into that.

The general idea is to pump all your army to the front line and overpower the enemies, at which point your momentum will over power theirs and you can move in to take over more of their planets. At this tipping point there's nothing they can do to stop you bar some seriously colorful and innovative playing. (things get complicated here regarding diplomatic ties in games involving more than 2 players, which is where the fun really lies.)

Hope this helped. Peace.

Mecha will find you....

could not resist lol shhhhh dont tell