I started playing Astro Empires about a month ago. Persistant Universe. They start you off with one week as if you were a paid account (upgraded, they don't take CC or anything.) Then the downside of the free account is that you have advertising (which is really unobtrusive) and you can only have 9 planetary bases. There are some other limits on the free account, but not too bad. And if you decide to pay it is something like 20 Euros a year. Don't expect to see Space battles, but they do have some very nice tech trees and the ability to develop planets and so forth. A really huge universe, the omega server has about 10K players
www.astroempires.com, I am not in a guild yet (which it is recommended that as a noob you get a guild pretty quick to help protect you) Although you are not allowed to be attacked at all until you reach level 10, and it is fairly punative for anyone to attack you until you are level 20 or 30. Also, it doesn't really pay for someone to attack another person that is much lower level than you. Anyway, my name's Denryu in that game if you try it.