Its really hard to tell from that map pictures, but are the capture points centered there or are they very close to the enemy edge? Because close to the enemy edge is a bug. Otherwise just... capture some of those points? You have a fully officered core of mobile capital ships and a whole swarm of frigates right? The Paragon is a bit slow, but the Conquests are not. I was just fighting a Remnant fleet with 2 Radiants before typing this out and I captured half the points just fine, and my frigate and destroyers are a heck of a lot slower than yours (1 wolf, 1 lasher (no officer), 3 Hammerheads, Sunder). I didn't do anything fancy, just pressed C on all the points, then removed the orders on the 1 the enemy deathballs was at and the one right next to it while driving my cruisers towards the enemy. I did take some losses in that fight so its not like it went perfectly, but I was able to grab DP for reinforcements.
Mercenaries are handy for my fleet (I only have 1) because it lets me boost my ECM and Nav ratings while having my custom better officers be on cruisers, and it roughly doubles the power of one of the destroyers or frigates in my fleet. Both make a decent difference, especially the ECM (which is a heck of a lot more important than it was last version, really caught me by surprise!). I can't really speak to your fleet because I haven't played with my own automated ships: I don't know how good those AI cores on the remnant frigates are (do they have energy weapon mastery? Benefit from wolfpack? I have no clue). But if you are worried about getting more DP, a mercenary would let you keep the rest of the fleet the same while deploying a high performance high speed frigate (tempest, omen, hyperion, afflictor though thats a bit specialty) to grab points and smash the enemy frigates while your big ships are coming up.
While I haven't played with the new DP system enough to totally understand it so I'm sure I'm missing things, I'll note that the new system has the
potential to work on a 'normal' difficulty curve: easier early/mid game, harder later game. Having systems with that curve is a really big improvement for the game, which has suffered
foreverfrom having an inverse difficulty curve of brutal early game, trivially easy lategame.
In the early/mid game, when a player might just be getting by with what they can find, haven't played the game much so don't know how to handle the ecm/nav system, don't have much experience piloting, etc etc. In that part of the game, enemy fleets should have fewer officers (hopefully! I think I've encountered some bad ones that break this that I hope get patched out to more reasonable levels) so the player isn't at a DP disadvantage. Then, as the game progresses and the player gets more resources, things get harder. The enemy gets more officers and more DP, forcing the player to improve their tactics and fleet synergy to keep up.
In theory, that kind of 'normal difficulty curve' DP system would be really good to stop the late game from being trivially easy (just spam caps like last version). I agree that it needs careful playtesting - I'm pretty sure I encountered some early/mid game pirate fleets with massive officer spam that breaks my above analysis, and I would like to see those gone! But lategame fleets = harder because of DP limits is a good mechanic for a normal difficulty curve.
It is fun to see when people point out a problem about they can't get a fair fight BEFORE enter a battle because enemy fleet can run at 3 time of the fleet size(compare to player ideal fleet size), 2 time officer DP weigh and don't need to worried about supply, the reply are about what you can do AFTER you enter field and follow a set of playstyle(spend some of your lesser than normal starting DP pt to field small ship w/ officer to capture pt, the only way to win DP race)
The solution of buying merc officer to even the field is just another prove that late game balance heavy working again the small fleet idea, not to mention this way make the already low paid bounty much more unprofitable
I think the reason people are saying things about how to fight is that by fighting better, the fight
becomes "fair". Because really, "fair" is subjective based on how good the player fleet is in the fight vs the enemy. As an extreme example: for an endgame player fleet with fully powered player and officers, is equal DP with pirates really a fair fight? Not even close, the player is going to absolutely stomp them. "Fair" might be giving pirates 300 DP to the player's 100 but lets be honest, even thats just going to resort in more pirate pinatas to pop.
Remnants are a lot tougher, but the same principle holds: is the fight be "fair" at 240:160 + reinforcements in battle, and 480 DP to 240 DP outside? The better the player fleet, and the more efficient they can be with DP, the more "fair" it is.