Before you even start, I would start to read a little bit in the official forum due to the fact that quite some things might have changed when you last played this game (new -Drone Formations, -LF4, -ships, -drone designs, -gates, -booty keys etc.)
After that you have 2 options:
1.) Either go on servers which are not that crowded and where you can get equipment easily from auction (some servers you get Aegis for 700.000 credits and also other stuff is very very cheap). A server merge of certain servers will be in progress in the upcoming month (it is not clear as of right now, which servers are gonna merge) - so a good idea would be to start getting all the equipment on empty servers and if you have luck your server will merge with other servers and you will have more people to hang around with on the maps
2.) You choose servers which are crowded (GE1, GA1) - however your progress will be much slower than on empty servers. You will get killed a lot. Equipment will be very expensive (normal Aegis on GE1 is at least 300 mio. cr./ Iris 100-120 mio cr. / Design goliaths like Spectrum at least 600 million credits up to 2 billion credits on GE1)
However it is more fun - there are more people online on these servers and there is more competition (PVP). You will progress together with guys which are on your level instead of playing alone on an empty server.
So after making that decision you could
-start playing normally by yourself or
-you could choose to bot your account so that you progress faster and also generate uri and gain some experience + honor at times when you are not online.
Without spending money you could use pixelbots like Candybot (not updated anymore but still working) or the free version of s-bot (however the free version has limited features) for collecting bonus boxes on PVP maps (pixelbots are not good for using them to kill NPC's). There is also the Toshinou bot which is still in developement by Freshek and which is quite a decent bot. I would give it a try.
If you want to spend money, you could also get Golem bot or Nanobot or other bots which you can find in "Bot Thread" in this forum.
As of right now, I am using Candybot for collecting on PVP maps with Spearhead, PET (3 Radar protocols level 3 and 9 salvage protocols) without doubler - I get around 5-7k uridium per hour. If you let it collect too long, the amount will decrease.
Greetings