Sounds like you have a good plan. You will need better armour however. By the time you are in range for beam weapons, they will be able to see you and shoot at you. They may even outrange your beam weapons. Shields are a different story however. While I like shields they have a big drawback in this situation that having your shields raised gives you a big EM signature. If you want to go with shields at some point I would recommend pushing the regen rate as high as possible. The better the regen rate is compared to the shield strength the faster you will recharge your shields. You may need this if you are in combat before you raise them.
Your missile ships can get away with smaller missiles, try for missiles that do at least 4 points of damage so you get some armour penetration however. also make sure that the fire control can handle shooting at multiple small targets (1 f/c for every 5 launchers). This will be to deal with fighters/gunboats that close with you. As they are small to start with they are hard to see at longer ranges, You might even want to set all of your fire control for missiles up so that the largest resolution is 16-20 so you are optimized for killing gunboats. After all you never know when another cloak using race will show up, and this will help a lot.
Have really big passive sensors as you are not going to want to have any actives untill you start shooting. If you can cram the ability in I would even put small EM seekers on some of your missiles. This way you can open fire at a way point without activating your own active sensors and giving you away. They will only home in on ships with an active sensor going, or shields up, but that should help to hurt them from an ambush.
Good luck
Brian
Normally I'm all for having lots of armor and/or shields, anti-missile defenses, and multiple dedicated anti-missile ships as part of the fleet. However, if the majority of the combat units are going to be stealthy and ECM'ed fighters/FAC--and the rest at most 5000 tons--you still expect plenty of armor to be needed?
I hadn't put much thought into passive seeking missiles, but that seems like something I'll have to strongly consider. I was hoping to avoid missiles based on the strategic disadvantages--namely, the high expense--even though their tactical advantages are tremendous.
I agree, once you approach medium tech levels, you will need at least 5 levels of armor.
ECM can be a life savior here, push it when you can.
As for Microwaves, it pays off to have a few boxlaunchers with short ranged missile swarms to overwhelm their point defense and bring their shield down, so you can blind them with a quick followup strike.
If you want to be really sneaky, get some massive passives, and fire missiles with sensor guidance at the enemy from long range.
ECM, cloaking tech, heat dampened engines, and engine speed are going to be my top tech priorities. I'm really wondering if that might not work to make armor and shields unneeded, especially if my ships are small enough.
With your microwave/boxlauncher idea--why not have 20+ rapid-firing microwave fighters to bring the shield down instead of missiles? Seems like it would work just as well, with the 3x damage against shields.
You can combine this with a sensor fighter for added effect.
Can you explain what you mean by this? Are you saying a fighter packed with sensors instead of weapons who is the eyes for the rest of his fighter group?
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One question based on the combat I'm in right now: do you have to keep missile fire controls locked on their target until the missile hits the target? Prior combat experience (against the Star Swarm) suggests that I do, but as I wade through thousands of missiles while my own are on approach (against the startup NPR), I'm not so sure.