it depends on what the situation is with the attacked Talos system
you could us ether a guard mission or an attack mission to get the fleet there for immediate combat and to kick out invaders
or a rebase mission to that system so they won't wander off when the mission time runs out followed by a guard mission so they intercept incoming fleets...
or you know Attack-Rebase-Guard seems like the most likely order of events, you'll also want to put fleets on guard in other systems if you can figure out how the humans node lines are set-up but once you retake Talos fortify it because you know the humans can get there and they might not have other lines into your systems. human fleets are FAST so you wont get much if any warning before an attack but they have to travel down predetermined pathways that's their weakness.
I'm not sure if the ability for Zuul and humans to intercept each other in node space made it in, whether it's something that is being worked on or whether it was scrapped but they defiantly could in 1 so be warned of that.
shields are good but no replacement for Armor, all types of shield requires a ship section so you lose some firepower.
I find if your going to use them the standard shields MK I-IV are a better bet as they protect the entire ship and while can be taken down by too much damage they regenerate after a little bit. you also can't put them on anything larger than a Cruiser which puts them on only the smallest ship class in SotSII a major downgrade from SotSI.
The deflector and disruptor shields block all kinetic/missile or Energy weapons respectively but only protect the front of the ship
making them useless in close range combat. they can go on ships up to dreadnaughts...
Pairing deflectors with our shotguns seems like it would be a smart move EXCEPT while deflectors and disruptor shields are smart enough to not block fire from the ship they are on, the same cannot be said for other ships in the fleet. but it appears the SotSII deflector/disruptor shields have a deeper cone rather than the wide disk of SotSI which might make them better at protecting the ships sides and less prone to absorbing friendly fire but might also be simply cosmetic who knows???
Drones are well they're drones, their use in combat has always been iffy for me, they are weak to all the same things missiles are and you only get more between battles but they could provide a way to get more firepower downrange for a long range bombardment fleet like we have, assuming they fixed the bug where fighter drones wouldn't launch and simply acted as extra silly turrets.
Just be sure to retreat them for something else once their drones are dead.
the drone tech Itself is potentially more useful for what is higher up the tech tree like battleriders (basically destroyers without FTL), battlecruisers, and battleships, same idea as the riders just with increasing ship sizes.
once a Tarka only tech now everyone can flood the battlefield with ships carried on other ships.
also hows your turn load time looking? that's the thing that has killed all but two LPs of this I've seen.
you have a good chance, the others who made it were also screenshot format. even if the battles really do deserve video because they are beautiful and the main draw of the game.
it's been said that had they just took the original and slapped the upgraded combat system on it then it would have been Game of the Year possibly Game of the Decade no questions asked...
also you started with a high level shipyard around one of your starting worlds, be aware that every game I've seen
something comes along and destroys that specific shipyard so that particular random encounter might be less random than one would hope.