I don't know? but just play on low difficulty level and you pretty much cant go wrong until you get a handle on things.
You can find plenty of good tips in this website, and i can give you a few good tips right now actually....
Best tip of all.... if you can manage to find the option, activate 'pause at end of turn' That way, you get to decide when you are ready to end your turn by hitting the end turn button.
You will have noticed the menu options with various titles i forget exactly, but one of them is called 'scinario' .... you can go in there and chose 'activate scinario editor' and it will warn you that no further score will be added.... thats fine, just save your game before activating this..... ok when you activate it, you can see the entire map and look and see if anyone spawned close to you and if they did, you can start a new game. But if not, and your map looks good, load up your saved game from before activating scinario editor and your good to go!
What else.... well, you will probably want to save the game fairly often, especially before reclaiming a pod (like a map goodie hut), or whenever trying to send a colony pod or other unarmed unit across a fungus square.
(Plenty of other tips but these are the bare essentials for successful play)
