In that case, welcome to the Online Multiplayer community and congratulations on moving up from single player.

I suggest that you read previous threads in this forum and do a Google search of this website for "Raging Amish", a brilliant stategician who generously shares his thoughts and insights with the community.  See if you can find his Unit Guide that describes all of the ships and their strengths and weaknesses.

Also, watch replays of games and pay attention to the really good players and try to understand why they do what they do or what they are thinking.  See if you can reverse-engineer your startegy that way.

This is a hard game to get into online and it has a learning curve.  I suggest that you just be patient and take your lumps and try to enjoy, not winning, but the process of improving and learning and becoming increasingly competitive in every game.  If you're going to get kicked off the map--can you do it in such a way that you go out being a huge pain in the ass?  Can you do it in such a way that it ends up occupying a large amount of your opponents' time, buying your allies time to knock off the opposing players that they are beating?  Keep in mind that these are TEAM games and that your goal should be to do whatever you can to help your team win.

Also, consider playing the PUG matches so that you can play with semi-balanced teams (with you being the last pick on the first team).  Also, consider playing non-Entrenchment single player Sins for a while because you'll be more likely to find new players there, I think.  Just about everyone who loves playing online has Entrenchment so you'll find the newer players in regular, vanilla Sins.

This post is good for cap ships: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/335807

As for support cruisers:

TEC Hoshiko:  excellent, easily the best support cruiser in the game.  Bring it out early and in large numbers.  Great hit points, excellent utility, and low cost.  Its healing abilities are unrivaled, and its secondary ability (the demo bots) is invaluable against high-end units like heavy cruisers.

TEC Cielo:  a solid support cruiser, good to fill out your army with.  Improves your ships general abilities and also helps focus fire enemy ships.  You don't need very many of these.

Advent Guardian:  awesome support cruiser, great synergy with the Progenitor Mothership's shield regeneration.  This greatly extends the lifetime of the Advent fleet.  Its high end repulsion ability is top notch, used to keep short range enemy units (like heavy cruisers) out of attacking range.  A must for any Advent player.

Advent Subjugator:  a mediocre support cruiser.  Use it to prevent your capital ships from getting disrupted and to heal them.  Otherwise not really worth your time and effort.

Vasari Subverter:  possibly the worst support cruiser in the game.  Too fragile and ineffective at what it does to be really effective.  Put your money elsewhere.

Vasari Overseer:  decent healing and auxiliary abilities.  Not a Hoshiko, but still a great asset to your fleet.

Thank you for the advice. I have improved in my game and while Im still a newb im getting better. Currently the problem is that I tend to run an unbalanced game. I'd like some advice on how to run a economic and military game and the same time and try to balance it out as much as possible. Also, advice on defenses, and what upgrades to get and when, when to build ships, and target planets would be useful. Another problem is that I need to grab more planets in the early game, and while I do grab neutrals if they are available, I need to expand. In addition, i developed a hit-and-run strategy and id like feedback on it. I let my closest opponent  grow out and while his fleet was expanding on the other side of his empire I used a rush fleet and attacked a nearby planet. I posistioned scouts at some of his planets as warning beacons. When his fleet arrived a jump away from the planet I was attacking I fell back. He followed me and i led him into a trap because the planet i fell back to was very heavily defended. Is this a good strategy?

Typically you should be a little further ahead on the military tree than the economic tree.  The reason is quite simple really:  a good economy means nothing if you can't defend it.  As I've mentioned before, acquiring new planets is a better way to build a strong economy than building trade ports or any other structures.  As a result, one of the best reasons to get some civic labs early on is to access ice or volcanic worlds.  Capturing one of these (especially if it has 4 rocks) will pay off way faster than any trade ports.

Usually I reach the 3-lab level for military before I even start civic technology.  This gives you access to all the staple units: carriers, flaks, LRF's, and the best support cruisers (Hoshiko and Guardian).  There are reasons to start the civic path earlier, but always make sure you have the ability to defend yourself and good reason to be bringing out civic labs quickly.  Typically you shouldn't go for the civic path early on unless you have allies covering your flanks or the distance between you and your nearest enemy is 6 or more jumps.

The civic tree is a little trickier than the military tree.  It's similar in that you have to think about what techs you want, and to put up exactly as many labs as you need.  It's different in that it's often very hard to forsee your position five minutes in the future.  Just because I want trade ports now doesn't mean I'll be in a position to build them in five minutes after my labs and the research are done.  Maybe I'll be attacked in the meantime and I won't be able to put up the money for the structures.

Never go overboard on the civic tree; get as many labs as you need and only the techs you need.  Don't rush into trade ports.  They are to your economy as a second capital ship is to your military.  A great asset, to be sure, but a huge investment to bring out and extremely risky.  Make sure you can support it first.  Advent typically can stop at 3-labs.  They have a couple decent techs, but after the 3-lab level there's nothing really fantastic until allure of the unity, which isn't worth plotting down 5 labs.  TEC usually can stop at 4 labs, although it does have useful techs along the way up.  Vasari can also stop at 4 labs.  Their high level techs are more strategic in nature (like phase stabilizers).  Whether you even want those techs may vary based on your strategy and situation.

On the military side, there isn't much for TEC or Vasari above the 6-lab level, and usually the 7 and 8 lab levels can be ignored entirely until the very late game.  The only poor level for Advent is the 4-lab level.  Not much there.  The 5-lab levels gets your repulsion and plenty of other useful upgrades, the 6-lab level finally gets you your armour upgrade.  The 7-lab level has lots of goodies (but lots of prerequisites, so no need to rush to it), and the 8-lab level gets you mass transcendance.  Probably the best balanced military tree at the higher lab-levels, compensating for that shabby civic tree.

The repair bay is the number one defensive asset.  It makes everything else that much better, and can be used to repair an offensive fleet after it retreats, giving it higher versatility.  A lot of people like putting frigate factories in there so they can build a fleet during the battle.  With repair bays, your numerical advantage will grow and the enemy will have to retreat.  I personally don't like this since if you do it on several planets the logistics cost adds up, but on a front-line world it's great.

As for luring people into traps, it's always good fun, but be mindful of falling into one of their's.  The winner of any contest of traps is always going to be the one who scouted best, because he'll know the tricks the enemy has set and know how to deal with them.  For this reason, you should pay attention to how your enemy scouts.  If you can figure out whether he auto-scouts or manually scouts, that tells you a lot about him.  A manual scouter is very likely looking at everything his scout does, so you can be sure he's an attentive and meticulous player.  Unlikely to fall into a trap he knows about.  An auto-scouter may not even be paying attention.  However, you need to look at the fine details to determine whether the scout is being ordered manually or automatically.