Best Strategies and Ships for the Different Difficulties

These strategies might be outdated somewhat, fyi.

Your best strategy is to make use of your Distress beacons. If there are a bunch of enemies in a sector that has a bunch of unscouted sectors next to it, odds are good that more enemies are gonna fly in.

As such, use your Beacon to pull in their fleet from that 1 sector (assuming other surrounding ones are cleared!). The bad news is that they could come in anywhere on the map. Move into center of map to mitigate this issue, UNLESS you are long-range based.
Good news is that your weapons will be already primed and loaded so whey the do show up, and you can instakill one or two ships with a later game fleet.

You can also use beacons from a starbase which will help you fight and clear lots of bad guys.

Finally you can use a beacon to pull in an adjacent ALLIED SHIP into a fight.

Take Armada -> Energy cannon + Projectile cannon -> Few more projectile cannons, or any other stuff you happen to find -> Save up for more ships -> Wreck.

Avoid missiles. They suck - both as weapon to be used, and a weapon playing against. If you see enemy ship cruising far from you, shooting missiles, just jump out and ignore it. It is never worth it.

If you large group of enemies, use distress beacon, and basing on how many wants to move, either move into the spread group, they moved from, or wait, destroy incoming ships, and then move into the sector.

Some typos, but edit function seems not to be working - I also forgot to mention, that you want to upgrade Burst into your Projectile cannons first. Shields are usually no big deal, as they break (too) easily. You need lots of projectile cannons to get that juice DPS.

Don't under estimate many of the weapons and utilities.
Losing shields to those pesky celestials? Take a shield boost and shield drones.
Schillae photons and wanderer missiles hammering through those new shields? Try out an upgraded missile jammer with laser drones.
If you know your cornered about to take a full broadside from that incoming fleet then reorganise your fleet and call up a small ship as a sacrificial shield or strip a ships expensive weapons to take one for the team then losing that ship doesn't hurt so bad.
There is a use for everything in this game, even tractor beams and bolter fighters have amazing uses with a little thought because it's less about what you can afford and more about using what you have... unless your in a lone nightengale surrounded by 15 Celestial heavy cruiser carriers then maybe you're not gonna make it much further

My best strategy so far:

Take Harbinger, load up with Bolter Fighters...you can cram 3 of them. Update # of fighters on each by 1.
OR Take Valiant and load with 2 bolter fighters, get an energy cannon and projectile cannon ASAP, and upgrade # bolter fighters.

It seems that the maligned bolter fighters are the most cost-effective weapon you can buy, particularly early on. They tend to get in the way and block a lot of damage, plus are fairly decent on their own. The strategy is that you jump right on top of the enemy. Their point defense will shoot YOU, and your fighters which have balanced shield/hull damage will shred them pretty fast.

A few fighters are useless but when you have a swarm of 6 of them (or more) they are quite deadly.

From there, transition to whatever arrangement you want. Typically thats an energy cannon + several projectile cannons, until you find better.


I also tend to REROLL the first station quest till I get the Under Siege. I then go defend and usually the space station is a decent one with weapons. (occasionally not). This lets you kill any enemies already there, any that you dragged along with you on the way, and the quest spawn. Thats a good amount of scrap+wpn drops possibility, and you dont even need to contribute all that much. And station heals you during the fight.

I have reached map 58 by using a backup and restore app.  My Nexus 6 is rooted and by using Titanium Backup, when I reach the sector before the last one on a map, I exit the game and back it up. I then reenter the game and attempt the last sector. If I fail, I exit the game, do a data only restore, then reenter the game at the next to the last sector, ready to try another strategy.
My fleet consists of three Valiants. My flag ship is armed with 4 death rays with recycle times of 6, average hull damage of about 1300, average shield damage of about 750. One of the other ships is armed with 4 laser cannons with average recycle time of 4, hull damage of about 620, and average shield damage of 1250. My last ship is armed with 4 mega plasma cannons with an average recycle time of 5.1,average hull damage of 1250, and average shield damage of about 2900. All ships have one hangar bay devoted to shield repair drones and the other to hull repair drones. The point defenses on all three are 2 lasers and 2 bolters, the rest filled with shield boosters. My formation is side by side with the flagship in the middle and slightly behind. I have found this formation best most of the time. The reason is that I found that if you get the ships to cross over each other during the battle, their shields become cumulative, and protect each other. So, every time I warp into a hostile sector, I press pause, break formation and have the ship on the right head dead left, and the ship on the left head dead right. I also target the furthest enemy ship with my plasma cannons, because the nearest one is automatically targeted for everything, but by the time the plasma gets there, the ship has been destroyed by beam weapons. This way your plasma cannons can be much more useful. 
Some bugs I've noticed. 
Tiny fighters being targeted by multiple beams, but not getting destroyed until hit by something solid. 
Plasma and beam weapons continuing to fire at enemies after they have warped out.

Just a few thoughts.

From the ships at the start the best ones by far are the Valiant and The Harbinger for carriers and The Armada as a weapon's platform. I have not played with the Trademark yet or any of the unlockable ships. The Harbinger, although reminiscent to a Battlestar, so it is kind of fun to pretend and use, is in fact fairly weak when cornered. I have lost a few games quite suddenly on Hard, if the enemy ends up chasing me or if you FTL into a map where a few enemy capital ships are armed with MK2s or other uber plasma weapons that knock your shields in seconds (even with 4 small shield generators at full) since you will probably take damage from the stages with (3+) stations as well, even if you FTL to the farthest corner of the map.

I find it almost impossible to not loose a ship at one point or another since it is only a matter of time before you get trapped; where you will be outnumbered as some ships you did not "see" due to the fog of war might just FLT in before your timer for you to bail is not fully reset. One of the best ways to avoid that is to set a formation where your two wings protect your flagship at either side, so if you loose one of them, well, you can always replace it. Not to mention the formation that you come into a sector is very important, which has been said by many before.

Also, in the later game, specially if you are playing endless, then YOU NEED an escape pod. You might still get shot down but if you make into one of your other ships, by then the FTL timer should have reset so you can jump out.

I have found that Bolt Fighters and Plasma bombers to be awesome, specially if you upgrade the range of the plasma bombers and burst. Since they will circle the target just far enough away to last a bit longer plus the Bolt fighters also serve as cannon fodder for their point weapons thus your nukes can slip in easily.

Another neat trick is that when you use the "Stress Beacon" it also applies to some of your own friendly vessels in the sector next over. So you can literally call in the cavalry. ;-) It does not work with all ships but it works with about 50/50 that I have noticed. Most likely based if the ships have some sort of script in the game that it does not allow them to move.

But it is a good strategy to lead them into the sector before the last one (if it is a nebula) since if you need to FTL out, then the Nebula will stop you from going further and the enemy is bound to chase you. If they do, at least you will have a friend ready to fire at them the moment they FTL in.

One of the best strategies is to simply have a ton of fighters since they will literally take the bullets for you. Drones are not as good as fighters.