Thanks to Dalton for unbanning me just in time
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Anyway here are my 2 cents.
Weapons
Ordinance is broken. The patch fixed the fleet supply bug, but made an ordinance bug. When you fleet ships together, they slowly lose a bit of ordinance per turn. Either do not use ordinance requiring weapons, or do not fleet/only fleet when you're about to attack. I am staying away from ordinance completely.
That being said, Tuxedo is right. Meson blasters are the best weapon. You can put in 1.5 Meson blasters for every other kind of weapon at least, and researching energy pulse weapons gives you Point-Defense Blaster, a PD gun that shoots 4x as fast as Point-Defense Cannons and 6x as fast as Flak Cannons. Energy pulse weapons is an obvious no-brainer.
Fighters
Fighters are extremely powerful, mostly because their armor gives them incredible resistance to the lower levels of PD, and also because their maintainence costs are so low. Also, fighters are essential to chasing down retreating enemy ships. Fighter acceleration and turning rate makes them the only kind of ship that can reliably dance in and out of range or retarget. Fighters are so powerful that if you let them target "Only unarmed ships" or "Only carriers" or "Only planet" and so on, they'll get there before the defenders can react and blow it up, unless of course the defenders have their own fighters. Eventually fighters get so powerful PD guns are useless against them.
The only problem is, fighters are bugged, or balanced if you want to call it that, because every time you launch a fighter it sucks up supplies. If a fighter has 900 worth of supply storage, it sucks up 900 supplies from the carrier and your carriers are quickly empty. You need a lot of supply ships to use fighters. Maybe even 1 supply ship for every fighter. But seeing how powerful fighters are, it might be worth it.
Supply
Once your ships run out of supplies, they're toast. SE:V generates 1k supplies per supply depot, and your starting ships begin with 6k supplies and gradually by the end game your gigantic ships have upwards of 20k supplies. So if you've got a 10 ship fleet, or a 100 ship fleet, there's no way you're going to sit in orbit for 50 turns waiting for the supply depot to generate enough supplies for you. Building a lot of supply depots doesn't work either since they only make 1k/turn.
Bottom line is, treat your ships as highly expendable. Once your supplies are gone, the ship is as good as dead. Better to scrap it and make a new one.
A partial workaround is to make huge supply only ships. Make a supply only ship with supply components and the bare essential bridge/life support/crew quarters, and whenever you want to resupply your fleet you build one, transfer the supplies over and scrap it. But resupply depots are worthless. I read if you start out in a system with three stars you can use solar collectors too so your ships run on "fumes", but if you start out in two or single star systems, even high levels of solar collectors won't work.
Movement
Since ships have acceleration and turning rate, that means dancing in and out of range is no longer a good tactic. You could compensate and use smaller faster ships, but they'll just be weak and won't survive against larger more powerful ships. And larger ships cost only a little more than smaller ships... the difference in maintainence between a dreadnaught and a frigate is only a few thousand minerals.
Bigger is even better in SE:V, unless you go with fighters.
Strategy
I wanted to try a strategy I used a lot in SE:IV. That is ignore ship hulls completely and do my light carrier rush.
In SE:V, construction costs 60k, and fighters cost only 10k instead of 100k research. So it's even easier in SE:V. The idea is to get heavy mount, and use a cheaply researched weapon. I chose meson blasters in SE:V, because of the weight efficiency and researching energy pulse gives you access to point defense blasters.
I can pull off such a ship by turn 10. The meson blasters do 105 damage, and the ship's fully armored on upper/middle/lower decks with everything else in the picture. Actually with a 100k resource start, I can start building an 850 kT ship with heavy mount level 1 by turn 3, though that's not a good idea unless they start out right beside you. The idea isn't so much as to load the carriers up with fighters, but to build 20-30 of them and use them as disposable battleships. A few of the carriers will have fighters of course.
It's probably a good strategy to beat 1v1, but with more in the long run hulls should win, at least in SE:IV. I have no idea in SE:V, because fighters seem so powerful and by endgame they're unstoppable. The fighter supply "bug" balances it a little. We'll have to see.
The strategy might be weak to missiles, given the ships have no point defense, or it might be weak to fighters that target the carriers first. A wing of ten fighters can bring down one such fully armored carrier in ten seconds. But since you're going in with a few fully loaded carriers only anyway, even if a lot of carriers die you should have more than enough room to recover them all and continue your invasion.
First turn
It seems the winning research strategy is, whether or not you are going light carrier rush, physics and construction. Physics gives you shields and energy pulse weapons and construction gives you fighters and mines. I'm sorry IB, but it looks like there's only one competitive way to play SE:V, at least until the ordinance bug is fixed. And even then, energy pulse weapons give a weapon that's 1.5 times more efficient and a 4x faster firing PD, so there is no other good weapon except for possibly electric discharge/tk projectors. Electric discharge takes 100k to research organic technology though, and doesn't give you the faster firing PD.
Overall Strategy
It looks like the "land rush" is even more powerful now. In the Adamant game Nova Andromeda was particularly good at that and sent colony ships deep into enemy territory filling them with graviton hellbore fighters.
Build many colonizers, as many as possible, and try and get them in your opponent's territory. If you see an opponent's ship, colonize and immediately start building mines or fighters. Since fighters are so powerful even ten or so could take out a destroyer. It's more powerful because you don't see the entire system when you jump in and it's easier to sneak a colony ship by.
This is a little painful, having to wait 4 days just so I can build a colony ship. If you get everyone's turn early, can we run things a smidge faster maybe
Use emergency build, colony ship out in one
. There's no reason not to, because on turn five you can have a colony ship colonize a nearby tiny planet, and build a space yard that'll be ready by turn 11. Land rush is even more important now that there's no orbital space yards and you need a shipyard on every single planet. By turn 10 you should have 30 colonizers, and by turn 15 maybe 25-30 planets, with 20 yards ready to make your fleet of doom, with a few "outposts" in enemy territory. If you properly defend your planets with fighters and mines, and plug your warp points, any rush between turn 0-15 should fail, though I don't know whether a fleet of 20 turn 10 destroyers could take out mines + fighters. I don't think so. By turn 20 you could have 20 "light carriers" and a few minesweeping ships ready to invade, along with 100+ fighters.
Brian
