Wow, 6 pages long!
a couple of points incase they've not already been covered (6 pages was tldr):
SuicideJunkie (the dev of THANCS) also posts here in bay12, I believe he's away for the weekend but will no doubt poke his head in here once he gets back.
for help, the easiest way is to join the freenode IRC chan #spaceempires.
THANCS is multiplayer only, there's currently no AI.
you may need freeglut.dll it's in the THANCS folder on imagemod (where you got thancs)
just pop it into the local thancs root folder. (where THANCS-perlgui.exe is)
for PBW captcha, see here:
http://wiki.spaceempires.net/index.php/Racessetting up games currently is a little tricky, and the documentation is a little lacking, bear with us till we get that a little more user friendly.
some time ago I made this horrible howto vid on ship design:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOt4eoFKN1g this was way back with the old designer, since then we've got a better designer built into THANCS-perlgui.exe. still there maybe some usefull info in that vid. I did start to do another better updated video, (with less umming and ahhing) but then tripped over my microphone wire and broke it. oh well.
someone commented on Begin, we (SJ, ekolis and myself) did create a clone of begin some time ago called VecTac (vector tactics) based on begin it has heaps of extra stuff, it's kind of been on the backburner rusting away for a few years, but it's a playable and fun game. if there's some interest I can set up a server and get it running (unlike begin, it's multiplayer only) see me SJ or ed in IRC.