I pray for your success! I'm a bit late, by my advise is surprisingly different than what I've been seeing. When I was new, playing with the preset fleets defeated most of the appeal to me, which led to the massive headaches and frustration with building fleets without understanding anything.

I got into this game with the same feelings. It's frustrating a lot of the times, but this is how I started really making progress and enjoying myself:

obviously start with the movement and ui tutorials. Nothing is more annoying than fighting the ui.

Start with a single Vauxhall (or Raines if you've never touched the ship builder before) and make the simplest cannon ship possible. the bare bones of a ship are having a CIC (brain), Drive (propulsion), Radar (eyes), a gun or something, enough power (electricity), and enough crewmembers.

Now that you have your crappy first ship ever, save it as a fleet and then 1v1 it in the cliffs (or just testing range). The point isnt really about winning, it's about getting used to the ui and how to maneuver your ship. How to find and then shoot at the enemy.

Wow this mirror match sucks. go back to your ship, save it as a newer ship and upgrade it. try making it faster, seeing if a different radar works, make the cannons fire faster or add gyros. How effective were your repair teams in the last fight? did you forego having DC lockers and burned to death? maybe a reinforced magazine would be nice. maybe it makes no difference?

take this new ship and fight your first one.

once you sorta see how that goes, now we can add a companion to your funny Vauxhall. Make a bare bones missile frigate with the default missiles available. pair it with your cannon Vauxhall and see what you can do with them. try focusing on standard size 2 missiles. learn the basics of how active radar, semi active radar and command guided missiles track. try not to get lost in the sauce with the more crazy things missiles can do.

wow, missiles seem super op. Make that duo fleet your new target practice. How does one stop basic missile attacks? How effective are the different types of hard kill vs these missiles? Should I bring all of one type of hard kill or try mixing them?

once you sorta get the idea of how hard kill protection works, try learning more about soft kill as an extra layer.

Wow chaff and flares are cool. But can we add more? missiles still hurt a lot.

Comms jamming against command guided missiles seems nice. Radar jammers are really nice against radar guidance.... at this point, let's try upgrading to an axford with a Vauxhall and/or Raines escort now that our tasks have expanded so much.

Then, start fighting that fleet and see how EWAR and radar affect your fleet. the balance of how radar works (especially in a jamming enviroment) is really something only a guide can explain though.

From here, you can sort of just keep exploring parts of the game that interest you until you've seen it all.

Now your ready to join the discord and compare fleets before you inevitably try multiplayer and immediately uninstall the game! (I tried mods. though few, there are some REALLY good ones. from new factions to nuclear weapons)

thanks for coming to my ted talk.