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[NullForceOmega]

I like to have a good mix of destroyers/cruisers/battleships, corvettes are good with massive amounts of evasion but otherwise get gutted by everything.  A lot of ship utility is decided by your equipment, lots of armor is always good, good rate of fire as well (so kinetic weapons are actually really solid until you get lances), cruisers carry enough medium and small weapons to clear out small ships, and destroyers make great point-defense platforms.  Battleships are for obliterating anything stupid enough to get in their way.

[Sirus]

I hear that corvettes can mount torpedoes (or maybe that's wrong), so that could be a good use for them: mass torpedo spam.

[NullForceOmega]

My personal stance is that guided weapons in space is pure stupidity, but they do, in fact, have a dedicated torpedo carrier hull, specifically to create large amounts of disposable high-alpha torp boats.  Point defense can still stop basically all of them.

[Hanzoku]

Unless they have changed it in later patches, everything can mount torpedos - its currently my primary weapon system on most of my fleet.

[NullForceOmega]

In Heinlein they have radically changed mounting points and hulls, I believe that corvettes are currently the only ship able to mount torpedoes.

[Sirus]

The wiki mentions "torpedo cruisers" at one point, but who knows if that's accurate or not.

[NullForceOmega]

Still, if you aren't being really snobby about your space experience (like I am) torpedo corvettes are a thing, they can also serve okay picket duty with autocannons equipped, but generally their utility ceases once you hit late game, where destroyers are better for picket duty, cruisers make vastly superior 'kill the little guy' ships, and battleships are incredibly hard to kill walls of armor and gun.

[Baffler]

Cruisers do have a section that can mount torpedoes, but it's not really worth it when you could mount a large weapon or a hangar section IMO.

[umiman]

I like Corvettes simply because they're cheap as balls and can be produced by the gigaton. They're also really fast, which is excellent for dealing with some idiotic AI quirks such as:

1. Leaving invasion fleets undefended.
2. End game threats leaving constructors undefended.
3. Preventing enemy fleets from warping.

Also they soak a lot of fire. I'd rather replace 10 corvettes than 2 cruisers.

By the way, if you guys aren't sure what weapons are good in the new patch, there's a huge amount of Reddit posts taking about it. But tl;dr:

1. Plasma is best. Except against shields.
2. Kinetic is good overall.
3. Giga Cannon and artillery is great.
4. Energy Torpedoes are good against shields. (If I remember correctly) They're also immune to PD btw.
5. Lances are worthless.
6. Everything else is meh.

[Neonivek]

One thing to remember though is that some weapons become bad or great... depending on the size of your fleet

Huge fleets do not do well with short range weaponry... But are the ones who can make long range into the far better option.

[Flying Dice]

TBH though you need two variants of every ship you build. One 'normal', one which ignores armor and stacks shields for the inevitable fight with a laserboating enemy that ignores most/all of your armor. If you fight someone with mining lasers in the mid-game armor is literally a pointless waste of slots.

[EnigmaticHat]

My personal stance is that guided weapons in space is pure stupidity, but they do, in fact, have a dedicated torpedo carrier hull, specifically to create large amounts of disposable high-alpha torp boats.  Point defense can still stop basically all of them.

Wait what?  The way I look at it guided weapons would be the only useful weapons in space.  Doesn't matter how fast something is going, if you're far enough away it should be trivial to dodge it (or if you can't sense it, just move at random and hope you dodge it).

[Flying Dice]

Lasers, if your range was inside of a couple lightseconds and you had good targeting systems, hypothetically. With what we can do currently, though, nothing is really >good< in the sense of sci-fi weapons, just different shades of bad.

[Retropunch]

Children of a Dead Earth (if you haven't heard about this) models space warfare in some detail and is quite good. It's pretty much as close as you can get to a 'real' space warfare sim.

That being said, I'd assume most future space warfare would just be lobbing bits of metal/rock at things that are stationary/can't move fast and using drones with an explosive payload on anything else. Lasers are a hypothetical, but only if you could basically rake massive areas of space with them, which would require a ridiculous amount of power.

Space is BIG.

[Teneb]

Lasers are a hypothetical, but only if you could basically rake massive areas of space with them, which would require a ridiculous amount of power.

Aren't there laser "weapons" already? I say "weapons" because AFAIK they're only used to shoot down missiles.

That said, yeah, space warfare is pretty hard to imagine. Which is why I just give nearly all sci-fi space battles a pass as long as they look cool. If I was to speculate though, it might involve the conflicting spacecraft to close in on each other like ships-of-the-line of some centuries back.