Good luck!
FYI, I'm pretty sure that SA is highly tuned to SM2R4, so if by "classic" you mean something else you're probably going to see weird results. Also, have you read the Rigellian Diary? Steve's ship designs and description of his first few turns helped me a lot the first time I tried to play a campaign.
It's funny, how I always go through the same sequence (as with all good addictive behaviors
):
1) (Re-)read the Weber/White Starfire books. Gets me thinking about Starfire again.
2) (Re-)read the Diary. Gets me wanting to play Starfire again
3) Start up a new Starfire campaign. Last time I had the only empire at the start, and hit two failure modes:
A) I was wading through a sea of P and IND-1 NPR that I was spending all my time setting up and managing (especially on the diplomacy side). From the Diary, it looks like after the first P/IND or two, Steve put a house rule in place that they would simply be ignored. I checked this in the SFA database (v5.0) that came with SFA (by running Steve's game in SFA), and I didn't see any, so I think I'm correct on this.
B) The HT NPR that I *did* activate weren't very tough compared to my empire, so I didn't see a lot of potential for challenge going forward.
So this time (in the new campaign) I started with two empires: me and an arachnid (that I gave player-race starting funds etc. to). So far the bugs are out-producing me by a huge factor (4-5X after subtracting off maintenance and research), but it's going to take them forever to get to HT2, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
John