1)I've diversified with every kind of fleet, including mostly carriers. And they are wiped out by the AoE instantly..
With Carriers, you need to keep them out of range of the titan, by constantly moving them if necessary (AKA kiting). Granted that will be harder with that mob of pirate ships, but once you grind them down they should work pretty well. Carriers are actually pretty tough units for short periods of time.
If you're worried about doing this, Corvettes might be the safer choice, though they are more vulnerable to some of the pirate frigates, but the titan's abilities cannot harm them.
2)I'll try to use the EMP ship as you suggest, the Dunov, tho I'm not even sure if they are regenerating destroyed faciliities which I've spent so much time destroying... so that could be an issue. You said pirates dont regenerate their defenses.. but it sure feels like it.
The pirate raids, the forces that periodically attack you, will continue to be generated. What might be happening is you are bidding on the AI to get the pirates to attack it instead of you. This is a bad idea, since the pirates cannot attack the AI, they might just warp into the base and stay there, in effect reinforcing it. But neither the militia nor the pirates can ever actually build new ships or defenses (bar the occasional ability like the Sova's missile turrets, but these are tempoary).
It's much better to let the pirates attack you, especially on this map. They'll be good XP for your titan and capitalships, which you'll need high level ships for those high end maps.
3)My TEC titan has about 8k HP.. the pirate one, 14K hp.. theres really no chance when you do that math, lol.
I'm assuming you're TEC loyalist. The only way that would happen is either the pirates invested several titan levels into stat defense (a bad idea) or that Ragnarov is a much higher level than you. That would certainly be the result of losing that large fleet. And the difference between say a level 3 titan and a level 8 one is very large indeed, though you (and the AI in the future) have the option to rebuild your titan at the level it was destroyed at. The pirates do no have that option.
4) How the heck do I upgrade my TEC titan beyond level 3, or is that not possible?
All titans only level up by experience. Experience is generated by destroying enemy ships, and this is evenly distributed among all allied capitalships and titans below level 10 (the max level). Lets say you destroy a ship worth 100 XP. If you just had a titan in the gravity well, your titan would get all 100 XP. If you had a capitalship as well, the titan and the cap would each get 50 XP.
I realize I just said capitalships are important for defeating titans, but a mistake many new players make is they build too many capitalships early. Until they reach mid to high levels, frigates offer more stats (health and DPS) for the cost and fleet supply. Capitalships should be used primarily for their special abilities, which are much more effective at higher levels. Not only that, but the XP sharing I described above slows the level rate of all caps and titans, and in Sins a few high level capitalships are generally better than several low level ones.
As for actually leveling your titan, you can continue to farm pirate raids. You can send your capitalships away to the other star systems to take the weakly defended planets on the map if you want just the titan to get the XP(though you might run into pirate raids on those planets too, but you could just defeat the militia without colonizing the planets if needed). For capitalships, you can also "Buy" levels up to level 3 (4 with research), which while usually not worth while, it maybe good for this particular map, especially to get that Dunov.
And lastly, those pirates are crafty as hell even on this noob map. They bypass multiple starbases in order to attack that one planet way back in your empire that doesn't have fully beefed up defenses.. and they seem to be getting larger in their fleets all the time.. I'm not sure I can even hold them at this point.
That is strange, I haven't played with the pirates on much but usually they only attack frontline planets, though they'll sometimes be creative in how they get there (going through the star for example. They will ignore starbases at unowned planets/stars).
And for what it's worth, I think it was a huge mistake for the devs not to include hand holding map like yours into the game.. Just because Rebellion caters to veterans who need more challenges doesn't mean they can't cater to new players as well.
They did add two new tutorials covering the stuff added in the previous expansions, but before Rebellion you could disable all the AI on any map, so my sort of map wasn't necessary (not sure why at least 1 AI is required now). However the generic mix of at most 15 frigates guarding normal planets and the 30 or so frigates and 20 defense guns guarding a single pirate base on it might seem a bit anticlimatic, and doesn't really help you with defeating real formations of units.
As much pain as that heavily guarded pirate titan might have caused you, at least it's stuck in its cage so to speak. You're free to figure out how to beat it without it being an existential threat to you. Hopefully that will help when you fight one that is free to chase you to your home world. If you play through that map in it's entirety, virtually every unit in the game is present somewhere in order for you to see what they do, though I suspect by the time you take out that pirate base all but the "final battle" will be much easier for you.
3) The custom map that you are playing is harder than the standard game, no wonder you are struggling.
For the pirates and several of the heavily defended planets, yes it's quite possible he would never fight forces that hard against the easy AI. But at the same time he has unlimited time to build up to eventually take out those planets, which is something you cannot get from a standard Rebellion map. It maybe a bit rough for a "hand holding map", but hopefully it provides some worthwhile lessons without the stigma of having to lose a game in order to learn them.
I believe that the Titan itself has to do the killing for it to gain XP
This is false. A capitalship or titan merely has to be present in the gravity well when an enemy is destroyed.
