intro and object of the game

About Star Colonies, from BoardGameGeek:

The overpopulated Earth is slowly dying. Three human Factions: The Confederation of Sol, the Outer-Worlds Alliance and the Praetorans of Mars have been fighting for domination of the solar system with space fleets from their bases orbiting Earth, Mars and Titan. Now with the perfection of the FTL hyper drive, Scout-ships are finally able to explore distant stars. Earth, Mars and Titan have agreed a truce in order to settle colonists in new star systems far from our star. With a small fleet of ships, you must seek out and settling habitable worlds, but you would be wise to hire warships from these factions to protect your Outposts, for the future of these colonies will be beyond the control of Earth. Send out your Scouts to explore new systems, send out your Transports to bring back rare minerals and gasses to finance your fleet. Hire warships from the Confederation, Alliance and Praetoran navies for your private fleet. Build Outpost ships and finally Colony ships to settle worlds and claim the title of Star Lord! In the game you will upgrade your starting deck of Scout ships and Basic Transports with a fleet of warship cards from the three space faring factions. You can buy Outpost ships to build Outposts and later upgrade these to Colonies on suitable worlds you have explored or else capture them from other players. You may control 4 systems at any time by deploying your ships there. Objective: Control 4 Victory stars. Each Outpost is 1 star, Each Colony (upgrading Outpost) worth 2 stars. This means you win immediately when you control a Colony on 2 worlds, or an Outpost on 4 worlds. The main USPs for Star Colonies are: Area control (of star systems). Deploying ships to defend or to trade: carrying over unused credits, but you take a risk: extra Credits or nothing if system is seized. Flip discard to draw deck (not shuffle!) so build order stays intact. In the advanced game we add Infiltrators as deck manipulators. Interaction: ability to intercept an attack (with cards from hand) or to target specific star systems and deployed enemy ships. The full game works just as well with 2, 3 or 4 players. Players can start with a more peaceful tutor-mode game before the full on strategy game with the full card set. —description from the designer