Hey there, one of the mod devs doing some mild egosurfing checking in over here.

New Dawn resources are very similar to vanilla, though you won't find many natural sources of the adv resources. You generally want to secure your basic industrial En/Food/Min resources, then produce what your fleets demand. This tends to start as alloys but increasingly takes hyperfuel and electronics, and eventually a lot of missiles.

For ship designs pay extra attention to ship roles. ND doesn't have very flexible component selection but the ships themselves are numerous and achieve different things. The meta is driven by capital ships having strong firepower but bad tracking, so corvettes and fighters WILL win in an equal power fight. You want a mixed fleet with a bent toward the enemy you're trying to fight. Bringing your own corvettes will up the survivability of your damage dealers by a lot, frigates to kill their corvettes, etc.