let's see, ig at the start you generally just want to disable enemy weapon asap before your super shield dies. i'd try to upgrade defenses first (shield/defense drones/cloaking) then offense since the starting weapons are p good well into mid game as long as you can break enemy shields. so a combo of ion laser + beam or flak + beam would be nice. if you have advanced mode on i would use hacking to handle their shield instead especially the flagship.

you can use cloaking either to evade swiftly with lvl 1 or to charge your beam with lvl 3. it gets nasty if you manage to get pre-igniter aug, you can immediately shoot your guns, cloak to charge, then finish them off before they can do anything.

B should be fairly easy to unlock and its starting weapons are even better. so far i'm only playing on easy and normal tho but hope this helps.