I've been looking for an interesting/fun RTS for a while now (played AoE3 since release and SupCom till it was boring) and happily came across a number of reviews of SoaSE when I saw it was on the list of best games of 2008.

I bought the game w/o trying the demo and have to say that it's FANTASTIC!  I had to play a couple of games (after the tutorials) to figure out how to even get a construction frigate (it's not explained anywhere), but am doing well with things now.

Online play works great (I'm even behind a router), so I'm not sure what people are complaining about...though perhaps a few dozen games will reveal that.

Is there any recommended downloads (walk thrus/explanations, spreadsheets, ship details, etc) that I should get?  Any recommended mods for the UI or anything that will help me get up to speed quickly?  Maybe a recorded game or two?  I've seen the two tutorials on you.tube.  They were not all that helpfull.

 I'm partially asking for my LAN group who I'm in the process of convincing to purchase the game...many of them arent as driven as I am to get to the heart of a game.

Thanks for any input! 

RM