Weapon System Concentration

You should really focus on one weapon type. Multiples really won't do much for you, and the research points could be better spent elsewhere; in defense, for example.

Agreed, lets say you have 10 missile and 10 laser strength and your opponent decides to counter with 10 defense of beams. Roughly, you'll have the full 10 missile getting through and all of the beam neutralized. Now lets say you decide to simply make your warship 20 beam and no missile. The enemy will still absorb 10 beam, allowing the other 10 damage to hit the ship, so no difference overall. But, by focusing on just one weapons line of development, you'll get farther along the branch allowing for better weapons, instead of 2 different sub-par weapons.

Not even the full strength of missile would get through - offtype defense should subtract about 3 points of damage, IINM.

Well I've still been winning. I'll keep your advice in mind though.

And there's a lot to be said for that. It's really just opinions and preferences. If you are happy or feel that 2 weapon types are better, then by all means, keep doing that. It might or might not be "the best", but that doesnt really matter if you are happy doing it that way and it works.

I agree with the above posters, one type is best. However doing so means possibly having to have more than one completely different ship type to combat a particular enemy. To some, this management might be fine but to others, a combimation ship that works for multiple enemies might be more to their liking. Typically i do the former, but this can mean having fleets of ships that are useless aganst your remaining enemies. Upgrading them all is quite expensive.

I'm playing a game now, my first attempt on Obscene (I'm scared), and the Drengin (using missles) and Korx (using mass drivers) are each completely surpiror to me in military. I'm at war wit the Korx and can not afford to spend resources builing ships with missle defence while my immediate need is in armor. I'm considering building some medium hybrids with both defences; 100 of each (i have both defence branches researched) after i get some anti-korx ships built. Then these Hybirds can stand half a chance aginst either enemy (in case the drengin declare war). While my example deals with defenses, I can see why the need may arise for mixed weapons, especially in a game with as many opponents as the OP. I'm just lucky that no one else used lasers as I have so no one bothered to get defences against them.

The key here is that the OP plays against 10 races. That will invariably mean multiple types of weapons and defenses to counter. As a result, it makes sense why using a dual weapon type approach could work well for the OP. I'm not sure what difficulty he plays, but that also makes a huge difference. I usually can't afford the time and effort to research two separate weapon lines.

I usually play small and medium abundant maps with fewer AI. I also start warring extremely early. Sometimes I strike before I even have a chance to research any weapon lines at all.

A big factor for me is stealing technology through invasion. Since I play at suicidal, I will invariably steal far superior offensive/defense technology. I will usually research logistics and hull technology to take advantage of the stolen tech.

What I tend to do is make a jack-of-all-trades ship. However ships of different classes will specialize in a particular type of weapon and defense depending on the war theater they are assigned to. This flexibility allows me to redeploy them to other areas where conflict has risen up. They can usually hold the line until a ship specialized to that race can get to that sector. My ships posted here:
WWW Link have for example 6 available Medium hulls to play with and specialize whatever the need be.

In the regular sandbox games I will always play above Normal. The exact level depends on my mood.

I tend to go for a hybrid design where I focus on a single weapon type but all defense types. That makes me strong defensively against everything and strong offensively against all but 1 type. I usually ignore the weapon tree until I've seen what my opponent is focusing on. It's common for me to also get quite a few weapon techs via espionage before I start researching weapons.

I also tend to be the type to expand as fast as my economy allows and then turtle up and max out my economy and build starbases before starting wars.

I focus only on mass drivers, I remember reading somewhere that mass drivers had the best dammage compared to the cost, and minit. techs. Then sekondary hull types.

Then I build ships without defence and just a lot of weapons.

The result is a slow ship that tries to kill before it gets killed

Then I use all the other tech points on making my empires econemy strong enough to by all my ships where I want them

I donøt know if it is a good strategy and I will love to get some people with better experience than me to evaluate my taktic.