Battlestation: First Contact episode 1 tips and advice

Commanders!

Feel free to post your tips and advice on episode 1 here.

I figured I'd post strategies I used on these individual episode threads as well. Here goes.

My winning strategy was:

1. Had the lowest amount of marines and didn’t build a hangar at all. So no ship captures. Distributed the surplus I had from cutting marines evenly between engineers and scientist
2. I didn’t change the allocation of research during the whole game, so even steven there as well
3. First I built just one bolter on the station, which I later changed to missile and rest slots were filled with hangars
4. I found that a working trick was to have couple of squads defending the station (one with bolter, second missile) and rest were on offense so they could quickly engage the larger ships before they could do damage from distance (at some points I wish I would’ve been able to order my fighters directly to fly to a certain point on the map for best strategic positioning. At least I think that this isn’t currently possible. However, mostly the fighters were where I wanted them to be).
5. Tweaked the engineers a bit depending on the situation, but generally had allocation to weapons down to zero. Some points when fighers went down like flies, I set all engineers to hangars for some time.
6. I think setting the behavior of the fighters is crucial to success. Bolters handle smaller targets and couple of missile fighters take on the larger ships (shields and turrets).
7. When it comes to calling reinforcements, I started off with a missile boat sitting snuggly next to the station with a squadron of fighters protecting it. Later I called a battleship and finally a capital ship. As I had some surplus near the end of the game at waves 40+, I called couple more missile boats and a battleship.
8. With this strategy my station never had its shields taken down and when the mothership appeared, I just went all in, changed all fighters to offensive and ordered all larger ships to advance on the mother. I guess if I hadn’t done this, the mothership would’ve eaten my offensive fighters alive and then proceeded to rip my station apart. Although I had enough firepower to take it down, I’d estimate failing to make to first swift move against it would’ve made the difference between winning or losing.

Oh, almost forgot, all my fighters were equipped with shields

Basically I do the same as above, i.e. neglect marines, build up to nine hangars, put a strong emphasis on offensive fighters equipped with shields and missiles and buy at least one capital. That works always for me.

I tried many different strategies, but it's the only one where I don't rely on getting a decent mix of laser and plasma at my battle ship.

I had a lot of fun doing a no fighters strategy. Reduce all marines and pilots to lowest amount, had 60 scientists all on energy for the most part, and engineering was almost entirely on weapons. Had all bolters until i got laser, built them one at a time across from eachother, had four lasers and two fixers before the end of the mission... and the boss was an absolute cakewalk. Lol

Sweet! Awesome job, nice to see some action here as well