I need more credits and power

Credits can be earned from using turns, from selling things on the market, from slave empires, and from artifacts. The most common ways of earning money are turns and the market. As a Terran, you will generally use either Commercial or Agriculture as your main form of income. Commercial provides a stable income that you can see immediately, while with Agriculture you will usually have a negative credit income and make your money by selling food. For beginning, I`d reccomend Commercial. Research Commercial Infrastructure, to level 20, then research ships and clusters from the Research Tree. After you`ve done this, you will want to get more planets. That can be done by either exploring or attacking. Make sure to build just enough housing on your planets to get a population equal to or within 10 above the total land of the planet, and assign all the rest of the land to Commercial.

you want to focus on getting credits before power.

depending on your race you should research a particular type of infrastructure and then try to get a high land count and build whichever type of infra that you research and make money from that. If you`re Terran the most common and best by my standards is to research and build commercial. If you want to exam the strengths and weakness of your race to see what would best suite you i would recommend looking in the manual under races and give it a good look over.

after you get a decent amount of income you can explore more and more planets will bring you more power... and also building more ships with the more money you will find your power growing exponentially.

gluck to you and feel free to ask around if you can`t quite decide or figure it out all the way.