Missiles are great, yeah. You want some long-range thingies to melt their shields, missiles to melt their hull and some PD (starting faction you want to use burst lasers. Most other factions also have a good laser for this I think) to melt their missiles.
... Especially if you're playing farmers, like I am right now. This is actually really fun, a nice change of pace from flying around in my personal death star, surrounded by a swarm of drones so immense that I literally have to move really slowly to prevent them from unloading.
Farmers are weak as shit, but I'm having fun. Their missiles pack a serious punch, so I'm putting lots of missiles on all of my stuff. Even more than I already was. The ships are also pretty slow, which is bad when groups of enemies melt you down easily. That said, I'm flying alone right now.
My ship has eight or something MC2s set to ripple fire and four medium missile launchers. Two station defense lasers act as PD and deal with tiny ships. Unobtanium struts line the command compartment and form the second layer of armor, after one or two layers of normal armor. Under that is a LOT of normal armor. It also has shields but due to the incremental nature of all player ships there is no space for size 2 shields, so it's all small shields scattered around the ship. Thrusters are external; fitting them inside is simply too hard. It can take down most non-capital ships, given all few tries, good maneuvering and not being outnumbered. I haven't had the chance to fight much else than Reds and agent fleets, though... Reds I can almost deal with, agent fleets just tear me apart.
Current ship designs include two flavors of mostly unarmed factories with seed launchers (but no solar panels), two small drones, lined with unobtanium. One has a medium missile launcher and two small guns, the other one has two big guns. 200 and 400 P respectively.
Then I have two medium-sized ships of about 1500 P, my personal ship and another gunship equipped with heavier guns and more missiles. Both obviously make heavy use of unobtanium.
All original designs have been scrapped due to being awful and ineffective.
This is really fun. Somebody wrote a strategy guide for this faction and I'm keeping it open in a tab. Can't wait to start building a greenhouse supership. So far, the small factory ships have been hugely successful and have easily multiplied in my absence, creating lots of tiny drones and somewhat bigger medium ships in the process. Early in the game I decided to build a ship consisting solely of solar panels to grind C. I did not anticipate the station I was grinding on suddenly making more of these ships. In a stroke of demented genius I added factory blocks to my resource grinder, and before I realised the consequences of my actions the entire screen was flooded with solar panels. I've deleted the design and moved to a different part of the galaxy.
FE:
Oh god I should be sleeping why did I write half a dozen paragraphs on my fledgling fleet.
I'll gibe screenshots when I'm not in bed and supposed to be sleeping.