DO NOT MAKE THE MISTAKE OF EXPECTING THAT YOU'LL BE ABLE TO DEFEND YOURSELF WITH STARBASES AND SUCH WHEN YOU HAVE LESS AREA THAN YOUR ENEMY!!!!!      It may be an effective tactic against the ai, but against any human you'll get crushed.  All out expansion is the order of the day in sins, and don't forget that.

I often make the mistake if i don't queue some research i will forget it later.. like the 4 titan research, i often forget the 4th one and wonder where the hell is my titan, even in online skilled matches.. so maybe 2-3 research queued is not a really bad thing if you are likely to forgot and it is an important one.. but true, it can kill you if you put all your early money in queued research

Don't build 10 capital ships in the beginning, it will leave you no chance even against Hard AI, and don't only rely on them, if you see you cant keep a capitalship alive for more than 1 minute dont build one, try to build more ships instead. Even against players it is not impossible to win without your capitalship.

Don't insist on building a shiptype your enemy is excellent against. Like building corvettes against light frigates mixed with flak frigates. Try to adjust to your enemy.

Hard to find balance in fleet building, economy building and technological advancement, but over time you will get used to it, just needs practice. Just don't overdo any of these making the other 2 underdeveloped, maybe technology can be neglected more than the other 2.

TEC rebels, it works most times to spam javelis mixed with other ships based on your enemys used ship types, really hard to counter, even if it is AI opponent, will fail miserably. Corvettes and light frigates are good too for rushingin the early minutes, but against harder ai-s before fleet you will need starbases in choke points.

Yes women are evil

Thanks for the tips...not to bug you guys and I know its not SC, but can we go a little in depth with BOs (for the record, I come from CoH, not SC). 

Also, is your first capital ship supposed to be free?

Yes, your first capital ship is free, except that it still takes 50 command points.

Build order depends a bit on which faction you are playing (I see you like TEC rebels), but also what type of game you are playing, i.e. single player, multiplayer with locked teams, multiplayer free-for-all, or a couple of players with a bunch of AI players around you.  Level of difficulty for single player and multiple humans + AI players also affects optimal opening moves.

Happy to chime in once I know what type of game you want help with.  It seems like you are playing TEC rebels in a standard single player game with easy or normal difficulty settings, but I just want to double-check.

It's impossible to really discuss them without a specific scenario  To put that into context, it took be a while to realize BO meant build order. In Sins its better just to know what is good when then have any sort of premade plan going into it beyond your initial expansion plans. At the very least we need to know are you planning on just playing the AI or multiplayer. And even then we have all the role issues in MP that make any real discussion of them require paragraphs of conditionals.

For learning the game, really just starting with your colony capital ships and corvettes while making sure your planets are generating positive revenue is all you really need to learn. The real learning comes by playing things and trying things out. If you'd rather experiment undisturbed, I've made a custom map where the AI can't attack you here. There's still some challenging battles if you want to fight them, but there is no AI power going to expand or attack you (except for the pirates if you have them on).

On the other hand of the spectrum if you're wanting to get to the competitive scene right away, really watching some replays or youtube videos of MP games is worth far more than any text I'd type.

I want to play multiplayer

LFs are good combined with Corvettes, as they counter each others counters. So early game you should probably focus on building those. Corvettes are just better for pure expansion against the militia, but if you're playing human players early you'll want a mixture of both (pure Corvette spam dies quickly to flak).

The most general unit progression for a multiplayer game usually starts out with LF + Corvettes and ends with titans, support cruisers, carriers and Corvettes. In the middle it can be pretty unpredictable. Sometimes LFs + Corvettes last until titans are deployed, but others a player may lose their early fleet and may build something else, so you can see a lot of different setups here.

That's hyperbole even for an Eradica, as it will need more than 1 attack and the cooldown of Chastic Burst is 30 seconds. 

it would still rape them easily

HCs are the best if you are at a time when fleets are pretty big but the titan(s) you are facing are low level (like level 1, maybe level 2)...

If you are facing lvl 3 titans or higher, you probably aren't going to get away with HCs (unless it's a TL titan) and will need to use bombers or corvettes....of course, if it's a VL titan then you are pretty much hosed unless you have your own fleet of decent level titan and caps...

That said, often players are carrying over their early game fleets into the mid-game, so the "ideal" fleet composition isn't particarly relevant...