The guide is designed to get you started with the Solar Conquest 2 game.
Best ship or lightcraft for your personality
Defender
The Defender is the cheapest option for defending. This lightcraft is not recommended unless your team's economy is terrible, because it is outgunned and has less health than the Interceptor and Cloak Fighter.
Interceptor
The Interceptor is great if you like dealing massive amounts of damage quickly and dogfighting in general. It is very hard to hit because of its fast speed, and needs real talent in flying to control it easily.
Cloak Fighter
This the perfect ship for mass destruction attacks and ambushing. It can cloak to hide from autodefenses, and it can also be used for scouting or nuking other planets.
Attacker
This is the perfect ship for you if you like suicide sieges and annihilating Light Corvettes. This midship's DPS gives it the ability to shred anything in its path. However, it has relatively low health and shields in exchange.
Bomber
This is the perfect ship for you if you like boom-and-zoom tactics. The bomber can easily annihilate several autodefense towers or RU storage structures in one optimal bombing run.
Light Corvette
Decent generalist ship. Cannot fight at longer ranges because of its flak spread. Beware of the aiming and hitreg problems that plague this ship.
Heavy Corvette
The current meta ship. This is the perfect ship for every task, such as sieging, destroying lightcraft, defending and much more.
Best ship for dogfighting
The Interceptor and Cloak Fighter are very good for dogfighting, but it depends on your preference and how good you are at flying. The Interceptor is perfect if you are an aggressive player. On the other hand, the Cloak Fighter will suit you well if you like ambushing enemy pilots. What really distinguishes them both is the Cloak Fighter's ability to cloak itself, hiding from an unfavorable fight to reposition and heal. The cloak fighter is more thin than the interceptor, which can make it somewhat difficult to hit head-on. You can drift by clicking z + ctrl.
Best strategies to siege planets
There are lots of different strategies you can use to attack a planet, but the most known are shown below.
Cloak nuking
With this strategy, you use a cloak and go to your target. Cloak before the defenses see you so you can pass and land on a Skyscraper and enter it. Or any closed structure in the center of the colony. It has to be closed so the defenses don't shoot you and the nuke down.
Tank solo
With this strategy, you use a cloak or defender. The main objective is to go to a blind spot of the autodefenses and place a tank. Use it to slowly take down each defense, one by one. It's suggested that after you shoot once, you hide until the defense stops shooting or when you reload. It's best that you fly under the planet's baseplate when looking for a place to hide and place your tank.
Outpost invasion
This strategy is not very effective against maxed-out planets, but it is still a good way to secure the planet before conquest. In this strategy, you place Outposts in different positions on the planet to take down other defenses. It can be very expensive and ineffective, though.
Bombing runs
This strategy takes both skill and a strong economy to do. You enter a planet from the top of the atmosphere and start targeting high value targets, like Missile Towers, Skyscrapers, and Tech Centers.
Best strategy to defend your planet
There is only one strategy that is good enough to defend against any type of attack. Which is spreading your buildings out on the surface of the planet. This will allow you to defend every corner of your planet and avoid the big damage caused by nukes.
Remember, manually defending a planet will always be better than any amount of autodefenses placed. A good player can easily solo-siege an entire planet.
How to use space structures
There are only 2 space structures.
Satellites
This is the only structure that you can use to defend your planet from space. This structure behaves like towers, but it shoots a missile like the ones from the missile tower after it's done firing its lasers. It can be used for both attack and defense. You can use it to defend your planet by putting it around your orbit or around anything you want to defend, like space stations. You can also use it to attack by placing it around the orbit of the other teams, but they could destroy the satellites from inside the planet without the satellites being able to shoot. This structure is a great way to defend your planet, especially when it comes to light craft; if you have enough satellites, it can also be very harmful to heavy ships that cannot get away from them fast enough. This could help you more to avoid damage caused to your planet by an attack.
Space stations
This structure is best to have a mini-operations center in any place in the system. It can be used to get ready for an attack or as a place for diplomatic meetings (for roleplayers). It can also save you when all of your planets are captured, as it contains spawns and extensions. The Space Station also contains parts used in btools. Another use for the Space Station is also as a hub for mining, as with a recent update you can use the excavator ship near an asteroid field and mine them, after that you return to the refinery (Space Station upgrade module) to distribute RU for your whole team.
Additional reading
Taletal0n, Beginners Guide to Offense in SCII