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EDIT: It actually took me a long time to pick up the other races because I was so used to the gates.
http://wiki.swordofthestars.com/sots1/Antimatter_Section
According to the wiki, lirr are by far the slowest in tactical speed (which only gets fixed once they get stutter drives). Strategically, hivers are obviously the slowest.
http://chariot.nickersonm.com/ANY_TechTree.html
As for humans. Humans are decent at anything and thus are the best for hit and run strategies. Their ships are very fast and they have no disadvantages in a straight fight or in production ships. Thus humans, like Zuul, are a huge rush faction. As human, build tankers and send them to scout everything you can get away with. Then quickly try to research and get a decent medium mount and transition in cruiser spam (make sure to get salvage quick because Human engines are pretty weak ironically not because of low health, they have middle health across the factions, but because of wide hitboxes).
Humans do well because they have a wildcard in terms of technology. They definitely not a starter faction but if you want to explore the tech tree and play around with any kind of weapon, then Humans are pretty good at it. They have a decent shot at just about every powerful late-game tech except for the most powerful (i.e you can get anti-matter cannon but not projector). So for Humans getting a great medium mount weapon is a priority. You have a decent chance of filling your large mount with a large beam or something.
Basically they've got great chances at all the good brawling weapons. Anti-matter cannons, phasers, stormers and heavy stormers and some of the more spam weapons like multi-missile (though humans have issues getting anti-matter missiles as they have only have a 60% of getting it) and compared to other factions, humans have a more well-rdunded and diverse tech tree. To put it bluntly, Players playing as the humans should immediately proceed down a single weapon line, mount it on the biggest ship they've got and throw at the enemy as fast as possible until they adapt to it, then quickly switch and kill their enemy because they overspecialized. It takes practice but since I played Human the most its ridiculously easy to research your way out of a problem compared to the other predictable species as they have lopsided tech tree.
Press the pause key on your keyboard to pause tactical combat. Orders can still be given.
Press ctrl + pgup to speed up the game speed
Ctrl + pgdown to slow down the game speed.
Just in case you're find the combat too slow or too fast.
I'll only take up to 4 C&Cs depending on how sturdy they are.
I'll only bring 1-2 refineries, just enough to get the fleet where it's going.
I'll bring 2-4 salvage ships, enough to fully repair things after battles.
Then 8 to 20 ish ships for fighting.
Then I try to keep as many fleets as I can fighting to keep the AI's fleets busy and spread thin.
IMO the best race for noobs is Hiver. The defensive benefits are huge and the ships are decent and easy to handle.
You just have to keep sending gateships out and swap to the new size gateship when you can.
#2 is Tarka. The Morrigi have a tough early game and you need to go to trade quickly, which is trouble in a small or medium galaxy, although the tech % and drive is nice.
Everything about this game is about exploration and grabbing good star systems so you can build big fleets also. My fleets usually have 2 CaC ships, 10-12 Blazers, 2 Fuel, 4 Repair ships. These are all cruisers. This only against AI though. Humans are MUCH harder to beat. 😀
1. Destroyers are not good for war
2. Lasers are not good for war
3. Too many point defense and command ships
The solution:
1 Command cruiser
1 Refinery
6 Armor class hammerhead cruisers with laser point defense in all small mounts, AP mass drivers in all other mounts
The tactics:
1. The best defense is attacking the enemy
2. Don't worry about tiny new colonies
3. Close to attack / pursuit and manually target the enemy command ship
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5. 60 years later antimatter cruiser fleets with railguns and neutronium rounds
Alternatively you can use plasma/fusion cannons instead of AP mass drivers
17 destroyers can't destroy 64 destroyers even with better lasers, but 6 armor piercing mass driver cruisers can kill 64 destroyers with emitters
Particle beams won't do much damage against destroyers, but 4-5 neutron beams concentrated on a enemy command mission section will pop it like a balloon
DF rockets are only medium good but they are also very beautiful
My approach for SotS (as Humans, on Hard) was to nano-manage every frame of every 6-v-6 tactical combat, and shoot off enemy sections and turrets ASAP. It worked in terms of kill ratio, about 20 to 1 in my favor. It failed in wall clock time: a 10-minute timer could take me one full week (7 days x 10 hours per day) to win. That was its own kind of hell. I don't recommend it, and I won't do it again myself.
I learned that SotS renders ~30 fps (sometimes 29, sometimes 31), and that beam weapons do consistent damage-per-frame. Switching a beam's target takes about 17 frames. So you can count frames-on-target and issue the switch about 17 frames in advance. Now do this with your 6 ships x 10 turrets each, firing at 40 different tiny targets simultaneously, and you're constantly spinning the view around in 3D to follow 100+ individual shots in flight, and counting their impacts. I'm weird this way; probably nobody else plays SotS like this.
You can't save a SotS game during a tactical combat, so you can never reboot or power off during that entire week, only suspend/hibernate. I once had to win a fight three times, because Microsoft pushed a Windows 10 Update that un-hibernated my PC overnight and restarted it while I slept, and 1 week later Microsoft always pushes an emergency hotfix after almost every update, and it got me again.
The gist of my method is that I'm usually outnumbered, and the enemy ships (Hiver) are slightly superior, with equal weapons and more armor. I hate taking losses, so I plan every fight to lose 0 ships. Ergo, I must minimize enemy reinforcements by not killing their ships off ASAP.
So the tactical goal is to cripple ships and leave them either helpless or adrift. It goes something like this:
1. blow up all enemy Heavy Combat Laser sections, and all Particle Beam turrets
2. destroy the enemy CNC to force another CNC to reinforce, repeat until you get them all
3. snipe off all enemy turrets, or destroy their engines
~~~~ enemy fleet is now reduced to the no-CNC limit of only 8 CP ~~~~
4. kill 1 enemy ship at a time, promptly swarm the 1 new reinforcement
I'm essentially immune to missiles, so I fear all standard-beam weapons that pierce a Deflector. In this game, that meant Heavy Combat Lasers on Blazer ships, Particle Beams on large turrets, and weak lasers on small turrets. My own fleet has X-Ray Lasers and Heavy Combat Lasers. Hence, every combat starts with an opening phase where my Blazers line up alpha-strike shots at enemy Blazer sections (and vice versa). Pivot and shoot, go through the checklist. The AI is stupid with its CNCs, and will put them at the front vertex of its V formation, so you can kill them ASAP.
Aiming your forward-firing weapons is a newbie trap. You actually control ship acceleration, both linear and angular, not absolute translation or orientation. And your ships are stupid about rotations: they will happily torque toward the target you want, ignoring any overshoot. Like any good pendulum, when they finally reach the right orientation, they have huge delta-theta (angular momentum), and promptly spin themselves off-target. Then you order them to turn back, and they happily overshoot the other way. I think AI ships all cheat their rotations to be optimal, so they can fly tight hairpins and get full HCL shots vs. you, and you can't do it to them.
Hence, the proper manual control is to order mild rotations through about 1/2 or 1/3 of the desired angle, then order an anti-rotation in the other direction to slow your nose down, and when your angular momentum is close to 0, only then click to target the enemy section and let the computer solve that simpler problem. Do this for every forward-firing ship, at every target, for every shot, for every tactical combat
To kill a stationary target like a gate or the planet, you can use Pursuit mode. It's fairly reliable at a coarse level.
You can slew or sideslip your ships by ordering them to move-then-pivot. You can even crabwalk a ship "sideways" by constantly giving it move-then-pivot orders of about 1/2 a ship-width left or right of its current position. This is useful if you're trapped between planet missiles, satellite missiles, and enemy ship missiles, and you need to move without exposing your rear end.
Use asteroids' sensor shadows to hide from enemy missiles and seekers. Beware that enough damage will shatter an asteroid. When the cloud of tiny planetoids disperses, the sensor shadow will vanish (and then the enemy fleet will promptly salvo new missiles at you as you scamper).
To snipe turrets, I learned to count frames-on-target. Every weapon shot does its stated damage, e.g. 30 damage for one X-Ray Laser shot that hits. Every beam does damage-per-time, roughly 7 damage per frame (with 30 frames per second). Ordering a target-switch costs 16-18 frames of delay, so you count frames and issue that order about 16 frames in advance. Turrets have fixed hp based on their size, so eventually you can frame-count them and predict exactly how many frames of a beam you need to snipe them off.
Every shot in SotS is individually modeled, as a particle (shot that travels) or a beam (instantaneous). When targeting tiny things like turrets, what matters is that a shot takes time, and therefore can miss, but a beam is instantaneous, and always hits exactly the pixel you aimed at. Heavy Combat Laser, Particle Beam, and Phasers are all "standard beam" weapons: they do exactly the same DPS (actually DPF, damage per frame). The only differences are their duration, cooldown times, and turret sizes. In contrast, X-Ray Lasers are a tedious, frustrating weapon to use for turret-sniping: the hit rate is about 1 in 8, so you waste an enormous amount of your DPS on outright misses, or you accidentally hit the ship's hull instead.
Ergo, if I ever return to SotS, I'll beeline directly to Phasers, or research another branch entirely. X-Ray Lasers are fine for pure DPS, and they're perfectly fine if you just want to blow things up (like Hiver gate ships), but sniping turrets is the one job they don't do well.
~~~~
I don't build a destroyer fleet. The Fission Age is for colonies and research, not weenie ships.
I colonize planets, build up trade routes, and beeline to cruisers. My first real combat ships were fusion cruisers with X-Ray Lasers. Some day I'll goof off with a weenie-rush gambit, where I swarm the first AI with cheap destroyers, but that might require a game with Point Defense. Anyways, I judged that I could get away with having 0 combat strength in the early game, and it worked out OK. The main drawback is that Hivers in that game did outnumber me by a lot, hence my maniacal tactics.
IIRC, I had just finished researching Dreadnoughts and Phasers in that same game, but then I took a break from SotS, and still haven't returned. Someday ...