Speaking of ship design, I played a LAN game of this against some human opponents once. The guys I was playing prided themselves on their min-maxing skills, but they weren’t tacticians in the military sense.
As I recall, and I may be wrong since it’s been so long, you either only had a certain number of spaces for weapons or you could fit more weapons into a space if they were linked together. At any rate, putting several of the same type of special ship tech together was more efficient than spreading them out.
Early in the game, when my opponents met, and scanned, my brand-new giant battleship, they were surprised and amused to see that I had several entirely separate Gyro Destabilizers (I think that’s what they were called – the things that spun enemy ships to a random facing). “Why do you have them spread out like that?” they asked, smirking.
We exchanged beam fire, weakening each other’s shields. Then we moved in closer, and rotated, to turn our fresh, undamaged shields toward each other.
Then I fired ONE Gyro Destabilizer, spinning their ship around randomly. Having the Gyro Ds separate meant each could be fired one at a time instead of all together. I fired the Gyro Ds again and again, spinning them each time, until their previously-weakened shield finally faced me. Then I punched through it and ravaged their hull and systems.
And so on on subsequent turns. They found themselves shooting at recharged shields each time, but with a little fiddling, I always hit the weak spot with everything I had. 
We never finished the game because they “lost interest.” I wouldn’t have enjoyed it so much (or remembered it for so long) had they not been so smugly condescending about my ship design when they first saw it. 
