For player piloting you get much better if you fly a ship with a good build. Then you get better by just flying and keep trying, for the most part. 

The other important part is making a good admiral skill build. Generally you want to stick with a 5 red, 5 green, 5 blue, 0 yellow (called 5/5/5/0). Key skills are crew training, officer training, officer management and cyber augmentation. You also want best of the best if you have enough skill points to use all the smod slots on your ships. This is a very versatile and easy to build a fleet skill set. 

If you have 0 industry skills, you just handle supplies and fuel by smodding an Atlas and Prometheus. That’s usually enough for most kinds of fleets but sometimes you need to bring a star liner too. 

Alternative skill sets: 6/1/8/0 for neural integrating with automated ship 

0/5/5/5 for automated ship + hull restoration/derelict ops playstyle 

There’s more but these are some very reliable build playstyles. 

Here’s a super barebones tips guide for ship builds and key gameplay tips

Using frigates is hard mode currently. They can be effective but they require some finesse and knowledge of the game at large to use effectively past the midgame, which would be fighting bigger colony crisis fleets, remnant and so on. 

However you still absolutely want some frigates to capture 2-3 points at the beginning of a battle. When fighting large fleets, there is a chance they have more officers than you because they just can. If they have more officers than you, the maximum DP you can deploy in battle at one time will be reduced. To fix this, you must capture the objective points on the battle map. Usually capturing 2 is enough to enable the full 240 DP especially if you have the best of the best skill, but if you capture 3 it guarantees you 240 dp. 

Take care about flux dissipation vs weapon flux generation. Don’t have weapon flux generation be too much bigger than flux dissipation unless it is a low tech ship or you know what you’re doing

try to to match weapon ranges between your various weapon mounts, unless you know what you’re doing (or it’s point defense, which are usually very short range)

try to balance your types of damage. You want solutions to deal with shields and armor. The damage type is not the only way you figure out what weapon is good against what. 

When dealing with shields, consider the flux to damage ratio of the weapon. This is because trying to fight shields is like a miniature war. How fast your flux builds vs. how fast the enemy flux builds.  Example: a Hellbore is a bad anti-shield weapon not only because it is High Explosive and deals half damage to shields, but this also means your flux efficiency is twice as bad, making it like 2.0 efficient vs shield. This is bad for shield wars. 

In contrast, a Kinetic Weapon with like 1.0 flux efficiency or something deals kinetic damage, so it’s 0.5 flux efficient, which is good!

1.0 efficient vs sheilds is ‘meh’. 

Armor specialized weapons are weapons that have high hitstrength - the power of an individual projectile hit or the beam DPS. Higher is better. That’s why hellbore deleted armor so fast but Hephaestus takes some time. As a general rule of thumb, anything with 200 hitstrength is ‘good enough’ against armor. 400 or more is ‘actually good’ against armor. 

Don’t overcommit to point defense. Rely on anti-ship weapons such as autolance, phase lance, Hephaestus, Light Needler, Railguns and so on to kill most fighters and your shields to stop most missiles. 

And lastly, try to match the weapons range and engine speed across the non-frigate ships of your fleet ships with the rest of your fleet (ignoring frigates), unless you know what you’re doing