First thing's first, the story is not amazing, not at all. The plot is generic, the voice actors suck, the plot line and missions are incredibly prone to breaking if you don't do specific things.
But that's not what makes Terran Conflict, or the X series in general, fun.
What makes them fun is that you're given free reign to play however you want, you want to build up a huge trade empire and make millions in mere minutes? Go for it. Want to build up a massive fleet at the control of your fingertips, then go on a galaxy wide crusade against everything in your path? Go nuts.
It has a learning curve akin to climbing Everest, but if you give it enough of a chance, I assure you, it will suck you in like no other game and you'll be utterly lost in the sheer scope and depth of the universe.
Couple starting tips for you.
1: Start off with some minor trading, in your basic ship, pick up some energy cells or something similar, find a station in the same sector, or next sector over that will give you a better price, and buy and sell between stations until you have enough money to go one of two ways.
Way 1: Buy a hauler cargo ship and outfit it with a fair few upgrades.
This will allow you to trade larger goods like ores and silicon, where the real money is in trading, much more effectively. You'll make a lot more cash, much quicker, but it can become quite tedious unless you don't mind that sort of thing.
Way 2: If your relations with the current race is high enough, buy an M3 fighter and do a couple fighting missions. (Look for stations with red, reticule style icons near them.) This can rake you in some serious money, but at a much greater risk, naturally.
Of course, if you choose method 1, when you get enough money, you can naturally also buy an M3 and have the best of both worlds, this is ideal as you can set your trader to automatically trade and make you money while you're off fighting, picking off pirates, or even going for a bit of piracy yourself by singling out a race and targeting their ships for cargo, or even the chance for the pilot to bail, for you to take that ship and sell it on for a massive profit.
After that point, I'd suggest getting an M6 corvette class ship, these things are monstrously powerful when outfitted with the right equipment, and at a beginning stage of the game, give you access to a number of more dangerous combat missions which will, in turn, get you even more money.
Basically, fight and trade your way up, I'd recommend getting at least a couple of M6 class ships, and a fair few fighters and transporters, then buy your own station.
A safe investment is usually a solar power plant for trading energy cells, you won't make loads of money from it, but it's safe and they're always in demand.
Ore mines are a reasonably good choice for an early game start too, but they're more demanding in terms of the cost required to run them.
As a side note, to construct stations, you have to have a TL class ship, but you never actually have to directly buy one yourself. There's a number of TL class ships available for hire, they'll be flying around the sector, all you have to do is contact them, ask to hire them, then they'll follow you. Bring them to a shipyard, load a station onto them and just go to whatever sector you want.
After that, then you can consider getting a capital ship, M2 destroyers are by far the most useful, their massive firepower makes a lot of combat missions a breeze, and with the back up of the M6 craft and fighters you should/will have bought by that stage, very little will be able to stop you during those missions.
From that point, you can do whatever the hell you want. Carry on trading, build up a larger fleet and just go nuts.
Hope that helped.
Yeah, I thought the game would be awesome, it is just a little on the daunting side to download expecting something similar to Freelancer and getting put into that universe. I was kinda scared away from it at first and never really played it again, but I really want to.
