Aeson
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Joined: 8/30/2013
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1. Infantry is used to invade a colony. Special forces are used to kill any infantry garrisoned on the planet. Correct ?
Special Forces have a chance to destroy facilities, such as fortified bunkers or planetary ion cannons, which have been built on the planet's surface and may impede your invasion. They are a supplement to your infantry and armor, not a replacement for them.
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1.2 Are Armored Forces only a super version of infantry ?
Armored units have double the offensive strength of infantry and equal defensive strength. They also cost twice the upkeep and take twice the space on transports. Whether or not this is superior is debatable. I would suggest using them to supplement your infantry armies, not replace them entirely, and try not to use armor as planetary garrison troops.
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1.3 Should i build dedicated transport or should i mix all 3 forces in the same transport ?
It's much less hassle if you don't bother keeping the ground units separated out in different transports, and it also leaves you less vulnerable to bad luck (oh dear, the transport carrying all the armor just got caught in that battleship's tractor beams...). If you want to do it, you can, but I don't see any significant advantage.
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1.4 Which Force should i send in first if any ?
Maybe Special Forces, to try to take out defensive facilities before the main landings. Nevertheless, I would generally not bother sorting my transports by what they're carrying; I'd rather have lots of any kind of boots on the ground fast than a swarm of transports sitting in range of enemy defenses or fleet elements while I sort out who lands when.
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2. Space weapons ... so many of them ... should i focus research on one area or two or really research them all ?
You would be better served by focusing your research into one or two weapon categories rather than spreading your research across all of them.
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2.2 Any very specific use for weapons ? Like torpedoes are super good for this and Ion canons for that ?
Missiles, fighters, and bombers are the game's dedicated stand-off weapons. Missiles also have a potential secondary use as weapons for boarding vessels, as their penalty to armor penetration makes it somewhat less likely for the boarding vessel to severely damage or destroy its target before the pods can do their work.
Railguns are the shortest-ranged weapon in the game and are at their best in the early game, when no one has good armor out yet. Their range disadvantage becomes progressively worse as you climb the tech tree, by comparison to the other weapons at similar points in the tree, and decent armor more or less completely negates the advantage they get from bypassing enemy shields. They're a fairly decent early weapon, but might be something you'd rather pass up when picking the weapons to continue developing.
Blasters and phasers are the intermediate-range weapons, by comparison with railguns and missiles/torpedoes, but are really the shortest-range weapons you really want to use as a primary weapon system. Blasters are general-purpose DPS, while phasers are more anti-armor specialists.
Torpedoes are your alternative to missiles for standoff weapons, and are more or less a compromise between blasters and missiles. Torpedoes have fairly decent short-range DPS, though they aren't quite as good as blasters at this (though they have higher per-shot damage, which means each shot is more likely to break armor plates after the shields are down), and they're almost as good as missiles in the long-range standoff role; like blasters, they suffer a range penalty, and like missiles they stand a fairly good chance of being able to take advantage of range. Getting closer to a torpedo boat makes the torpedo boat more dangerous, which is an advantage for torpedoes as compared to missiles, but missiles usually have a range advantage over torpedoes and, at sufficiently long range, also have a DPS advantage (though the range necessary for this to be true steadily increases as the game goes on).
Ultimately, torpedoes are probably the best general-purpose weapon in the game - they can play the long-range standoff game nearly as well as missiles can, they can play the short-range DPS game nearly as well as blasters can (but not quite; blasters have a decent point-blank DPS advantage over torpedoes), and they can play the anti-armor game about as well as phasers at point blank but their performance suffers with increasing range.
Ion cannons, area weapons, and graviton beams are in my opinion special-purpose weapons. Ion cannons do not cause any real harm to an enemy ship; instead, they disable some of its components. This is useful if you're trying to capture something intact, and for reducing the volume of incoming fire (though arguably killing the opposing ships or stations works as well or better), and ion cannons have an additional special use as a good weapon for use against the only space monster whose potential existence within the game is determined by the Disasters toggle during game setup. Area weapons are, in my opinion, a harassment weapon for lone raiding vessels; send the vessel to go hit a space station with lots of ships hovering around it, and the area weapon might cause a decent amount of damage. It's less useful in fleet actions as the computer will tend not to fire the weapon if it might hit your own ships, and moreover it's less likely that a fleet action will have as many closely packed ships as a spaceport would have. Graviton beams are a side-grade of tractor beams, in that they damage opposing ships (while bypassing both shields and armor, but being better against ships smaller than your own) and hold them in place, but I'm not of the opinion that gravitons are dangerous enough to justify making them a primary weapon. Area gravity weapons are more or less like area weapons, and might be worth pairing with regular area weapons to try to get more enemies into the center of the blast. Area ion weapons are also more or less like area weapons, except that they're probably less useful - I view area weapons as being best used on lone raiders, and so I'd rather cause damage than temporary inconvenience, and with a capture ship I'd rather use normal Ion Cannons.
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3. Fleet control. I did follow Jeeves' tutorial on fleet management but when a pirate attacked one of my mining base, nobody moved. I had several fleets covering the location, defend stance, sector range. The fleet was not refuelling or anything. How comes ?
If the fleets are too far from the mining base, they can't get there in time even if they do move. With sector engagement range, and they're most likely too far away to be useful; it's only really with high-end hyperdrives like Equinox IIIs or Torrents (and the introductory Torrent drive is a bit slow for this) that using a single fleet to cover a sector becomes practical for anything other than responding to attacks on heavily-fortified stations and systems (and if the attack on said heavily-fortified target is too weak, the responding fleets will not arrive in time, but may be pulled too far out of position to respond to another attack). Nearby systems is probably about as far as you want the fleet to cover before you get to the late-game hyperdrives. I'm not sure when they'll move, and it's possible that at some point the defensive stance became bugged, but it has worked in the past.
Also, if you don't automate the fleets that you placed in those stances and gave home bases to, the stances won't do anything.
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3.2 How do you set a fleet to "attack all ennemies within range" ? I declared war on the Boskara Hive and wanted my fleet to attack everything, but their freighters and mining ships were passing by unharmed....
If the enemies that you see flying by are in hyperspace, you should be aware that you cannot engage targets in hyperspace, and if you want to intercept them you either need to meet them at their destination (or hit them at their departure point) or develop the Gravity Well Projector (towards the end of the jump inhibiting line of techs below the hyperdrive techs), which will let you station an interdictor fleet somewhere along their travel route and pull them out of their jumps and, if you're close enough or fast enough, keep them from jumping away quickly.
Also, even if the freighters and mining ships were not passing by during a jump, they're probably the lowest-priority targets out there - warships and armed stations are much greater threats to your fleets, and so your warships will generally focus on those unless you explicitly order them to attack the freighters instead (though they will generally attack a nearby freighter or mining ship before jumping to attack a warship or station without your intervention). Additionally, civilian vessels will typically flee from military vessels that attack them, which can make it difficult for your warships to kill these without some form of jump inhibitor or a lot of firepower hitting the ship quickly.
You may also find this guide on fleet postures interesting, if you haven't read it:
http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=2973167
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few questions from a new player #2 Military control and... - 
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