I really need some help with this. I've played on and off for years and recently I've started playing again with this latest patch and I'm having real difficulties getting through the mid-game. I do bar missions and easy bounties but I barely break even after factoring in the cost of fuel and supplies, leaving me entirely dependant on having a commission. I've started a colony a few times and each time I get almost monthly pirate raids with fleets so massive they'd put the core world factions to shame. An orbital base can't stop them, and neither can my fleet combined with the base (which used to be enough, if barely). There's just too many of them and I can't upgrade the starbase in time because there's so many raids I can't finish the construction.
So I try getting better ships, I've got an onslaught, a couple of dominators and eagles, and a bunch of smaller destroyers. That's still not enough to hold back the sheer mass of pirates even fighting alongside my starbase. And during combat my ships always get themselves killed by letting themselves get surrounded and picked off. So I've resorted to holding all of the fleet to a defensive waypoint during combat to try and prevent them from getting baited away but even that's not enough and they'll still do it from time to time. And then of course because they're all clustered they can't fight very effectively. I used to assign escorts to the capital ships and let the capital ships lead combat but then the escorts now often end up doing nothing except follow around; leaving the capital ship to fight on its own unless an enemy's foolish enough to get super close. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to quickly assume control of a major ship because the AI's about to get itself killed.
This leads to fights where in theory I have much better ships/firepower and should win relatively easily to fights being desperate battles for survival where I need to constantly manually intervene to prevent the loss of incredibly expensive ships. Because of this I can't really take on the more lucrative bounties and I just live commission paycheck to commission paycheck so to speak. What am I doing wrong? I love this game but I've really hit a wall on this latest patch. It feels like nothing I do really matters or helps during fleet battles and even just the pirates come in such overwhelming numbers with so many high-value ships that even with battleships they just end up surrounding me and picking off my fleet bit by bit, while my incompetent ships either mindlessly charge in and get themselves killed or hang back and do a lot of nothing.