How do you win against stronger fleets? It seems that the only deciding factor determining whether I win or lose a battle is by how much I outgun the enemy. Are there any tricks to getting more out of your ships? Admittedly I'm not the most sophisticated admiral as I just designate ships to be eliminated. I don't even command my own flagship cause the AI is so much better and flying it.
1) Player ships. The player is always more efficient at fighting/targeting/whatever. The main advantage that you have is understanding the strategic space and being able to respond to it. You only have so many orders and many times these have to change at a moments notice so the player ship should be the primary "get things done ship". Sometimes this means you want to be piloting the torpedo bomber . Sometimes this means you should be piloting a Safety Overrides(SO) ship. Sometimes this means you have an Odyssey and two plasma cannons*.
The AI is better at reaction times. So it makes good with ships that have long range finishers.
Particularly good player ships for SO are the Lasher and Hammerhead and Sunder(The sunder is also good without SO if you have good equipment for it) for early game. The Falcon and Medusa(kinda needs 2 Heavy Blasters though) in middle game and the Aurora and Dominator in latergame. The Assault Chaingun anchors the ballistic based SO ships while the Heavy Blaster anchors the energy based ships. Dominators are pretty easy to fit (just don't put large guns in the large slots, go with HMG or Assault Chaingun) and have a mobility active and SO plus AC make them basically immune to fighters so they're pretty top line right now.
Way way late game these tend to fall off in favor of battleships (which cannot SO). Of which the Odyssey is the hands down best (because its mobile and the AI can make perfectly fine use out of a paragon). And the Onslaught or Conquest is probably second. (Onslaught has cap issues and the conquest is vulnerable to being swarmed)
2) Fleet Doctrine. The AI does not really have a fleet doctrine. Sometimes it shows up with well designed ships and sometimes it has properly allocated roles. But these largely do not scale as fleets get larger and optimal engagement ranges change. As a result the AI will tend to have generalist ships rather than ships designed to work in scale
So if you design your ships to work in scale you can crush large assortments of larger fleets. The standard one is fighter density. Once you achieve a fighter density your fighters can overwhelm any anti-fighter defense because anti-fighter defenses are localize) and cannot scale into big fleet sizes(max range 500 to 1000ish while fighter range is 4000) and then slaughter ships one by one. The 20 drover vid is an example of this.
Other examples are Falcons and Eagles, which, while weak to fighters, can bring 1400 range HVD. This is longer than any other anti-shield weapon can effectively fire (Mark IX Auto's on a Capital can hit 1440 but the aim isn't good enough to hit that far, and OK Heavy Needlers on a Paragon can hit 1600 but its only one ship). When stacked this creates a pretty effective line of fire that enemies cannot easily penetrate simply because the high range will allow shots to converge. Once your line cannot be broken you can pick ships off one by one using various means.
Other examples are good Anvils. Venture's and Apogees are the best imo. (one with good armor, one with good shields, but cheap in terms of DP) can be used to squeeze enemy ships into positions where you have a relative fire advantage. Proper Anvil use generally requires player ships to be the hammer but also works with fighter doctrine.
3) Proper use of orders. Do you see all those defend orders in the drover video? This is how you can create a structure for your fleet that it will roughly stick to. And if it can stick in formation then you can design ships to work in those formations and you can win based on exploiting that.
4) Dooms.... Just stack dooms.
*I have most definitely taken out top price bounties in a solo odyssey that would be 100% impossible for any other ship. Though you cannot do all of them.(phase ships will kill you, huge fighter density is also very risky)