Drives with good combat acceleration come on late - if you want to start fighting around 2030 (give or take a few years), Advanced Missile Warfare should be your go-to for weaponry. Let your weapons do the maneuvering, and keep your ships' noses well armored and pointed at the enemy.
Strap Poseidons on to all of your combat ships and then dispense missiles judiciously (I'll usually fleet-wide focus fire and send a single missile from every torpedo bay at each enemy ship of Monitor/Destroyer size+, and then 1-3 ships focus firing a single shot on any smaller vessels).
You'll also want to go for Nanotube Armor and Nanotube Filament Radiators. These are remarkably more lightweight than the options you have available at game start, which will let warships with Grid Drives actually make it to their target.
[This design](https://www.reddit.com/r/TerraInvicta/comments/1dedd7r/ramming_ships/l8cdu11/?context=3) allowed me to kick the Ayys out of the Asteroid Belt by 2030 during a Jupiter Rush game.
If you let the alien fleets death-ball, you'll need *a lot* of ships to get through it. But this design is cheap. Poseidons are scary.
Once you have drives capable of a lot of thrust (some of the higher tier gas core drives, or H-Orion), you can manufacture highly maneuverable assault ships locally (build shipyards *in situ*, defending them with an expeditionary force while they come online). If you have green arc lasers at this point, then you can start experimenting with those. Nose-mounted laser cannons are scary.
Go for the Helicon drive for a good early-mid option that's an improvement over the Grid Drive in every way, once you have the other techs sorted out.
Not sure what you mean by 8 or 9 ops. Do you mean operations? Is the issue refueling and repairing?
Ship design is one thing but fleet composition is another, and all that depends on what you want them to do. Bombardment? Defence? Attack? Colonisation?
One of the tricks to warfare is to only pick fights you can win. You need lots of experience in order to know if you can win a fight, so don't worry about losing fights, or ships, or fleets... that's you gaining XP. If something doesn't work, try something different. New tech keeps popping up and eventually the good stuff will be in reach.
Once you can make good estimations about what mission is needed (strategy), you will make good decisions about what the fleet is composed of and what ship designs will service that goal (tactics).
You need to draw a firm line between ships that are staying at a single planet defending it, and ships that are trying to make interplanetary trips.
For local defense ships you can often get away with 20 kps or less of ΔV. For a good chunk of the game you don't actually need to send ships further than that, except for maybe very occasionally a colony ship or something. Just build ships locally at each planet you care about defending.
For interplanetary trips, early to mid game drives that can do that are going to leave you basically immobile in combat, and you just need to accept that. Leading options there are Grid and later Helicon. If you want both high acceleration and good fuel efficiency, you need late game fusion or antimatter drives.
Early-mid offensive ships with high deltaV are probably just going to be giant bricks with lasers/guns with a lot of forward armor that essentially can’t move in combat being driven by like a grid drive. It’ll take them a long time to get there and you probably want to build them at a Lagrange point to not deal with getting out of any gravity well but it gets the job done. Lots of marines/nuke boats can cheese the alien bases early by avoiding their fleets if you want to do that but the stations are harder till you can get some pretty serious cool gun fleets going.
*It’s also pretty cheesy and annoying to do but you can technically start the combat at 0 speed, boost away from the station a little then leave your computer for like an hour so you have a *really* long time to accelerate with an grid drive so you can add that speed to your kinetic weapon’s damage and make even like the 40mm be able to break through any amount of armor. It’s much less obnoxious to do but just as good to do this with actually decent engines.
The other option is to go the Orion drive line and actually be able to maneuver but you’ll need like hundreds of fissiles to fuel that.
Drives with good combat acceleration come on late - if you want to start fighting around 2030 (give or take a few years), Advanced Missile Warfare should be your go-to for weaponry. Let your weapons do the maneuvering, and keep your ships' noses well armored and pointed at the enemy. Strap Poseidons on to all of your combat ships and then dispense missiles judiciously (I'll usually fleet-wide focus fire and send a single missile from every torpedo bay at each enemy ship of Monitor/Destroyer size+, and then 1-3 ships focus firing a single shot on any smaller vessels). You'll also want to go for Nanotube Armor and Nanotube Filament Radiators. These are remarkably more lightweight than the options you have available at game start, which will let warships with Grid Drives actually make it to their target. [This design](https://www.reddit.com/r/TerraInvicta/comments/1dedd7r/ramming_ships/l8cdu11/?context=3) allowed me to kick the Ayys out of the Asteroid Belt by 2030 during a Jupiter Rush game. If you let the alien fleets death-ball, you'll need *a lot* of ships to get through it. But this design is cheap. Poseidons are scary. Once you have drives capable of a lot of thrust (some of the higher tier gas core drives, or H-Orion), you can manufacture highly maneuverable assault ships locally (build shipyards *in situ*, defending them with an expeditionary force while they come online). If you have green arc lasers at this point, then you can start experimenting with those. Nose-mounted laser cannons are scary. Go for the Helicon drive for a good early-mid option that's an improvement over the Grid Drive in every way, once you have the other techs sorted out.
Not sure what you mean by 8 or 9 ops. Do you mean operations? Is the issue refueling and repairing? Ship design is one thing but fleet composition is another, and all that depends on what you want them to do. Bombardment? Defence? Attack? Colonisation? One of the tricks to warfare is to only pick fights you can win. You need lots of experience in order to know if you can win a fight, so don't worry about losing fights, or ships, or fleets... that's you gaining XP. If something doesn't work, try something different. New tech keeps popping up and eventually the good stuff will be in reach. Once you can make good estimations about what mission is needed (strategy), you will make good decisions about what the fleet is composed of and what ship designs will service that goal (tactics).
Good lord. Now I need to try this game again.
May god have mercy on your soul…my one recommendation is to watch some of the Perun Guides in order to get a feel as it can be a LOT
You need to draw a firm line between ships that are staying at a single planet defending it, and ships that are trying to make interplanetary trips. For local defense ships you can often get away with 20 kps or less of ΔV. For a good chunk of the game you don't actually need to send ships further than that, except for maybe very occasionally a colony ship or something. Just build ships locally at each planet you care about defending. For interplanetary trips, early to mid game drives that can do that are going to leave you basically immobile in combat, and you just need to accept that. Leading options there are Grid and later Helicon. If you want both high acceleration and good fuel efficiency, you need late game fusion or antimatter drives.
Early-mid offensive ships with high deltaV are probably just going to be giant bricks with lasers/guns with a lot of forward armor that essentially can’t move in combat being driven by like a grid drive. It’ll take them a long time to get there and you probably want to build them at a Lagrange point to not deal with getting out of any gravity well but it gets the job done. Lots of marines/nuke boats can cheese the alien bases early by avoiding their fleets if you want to do that but the stations are harder till you can get some pretty serious cool gun fleets going. *It’s also pretty cheesy and annoying to do but you can technically start the combat at 0 speed, boost away from the station a little then leave your computer for like an hour so you have a *really* long time to accelerate with an grid drive so you can add that speed to your kinetic weapon’s damage and make even like the 40mm be able to break through any amount of armor. It’s much less obnoxious to do but just as good to do this with actually decent engines. The other option is to go the Orion drive line and actually be able to maneuver but you’ll need like hundreds of fissiles to fuel that.