Map exploration and probes should both be covered by your exploration ships- unless you're playing some special galaxy/constellation setup you will need probes to find other constellations and pure movespeed ships will really only get you so far. Combat in ES2 is quite complicated and it takes quite a bit of game knowledge to be able to really fine tune your fleets. Try different design, all modules in different situations, you will learn quickly. Accelerator, all types of damagers, dust collectors, science collectors, leechers and many more.Д«est advice would be from me to you is to try. If you are new to the game, have few ships designs, but after hours you will probably have tons of ships designs like me :D. Early on you can use them as explorers and then, module to be a fighter or a support Huge power house and can be better than carrier, but eats more cp. Unless you are Hissho, military behemoth is a best choice. You can customize it depending on your play style, resources availability and enemy defenses. Is a flying fortress and 1 can be a game changer. At this point of the game if you have any sort of repair bots module, you can use support ships and if you play vodyani, support ships are extremely strong and must have. t2 ships are mandatory to fight other factions, if you get 1 or 2 earlier than your opponent you can have a huge advantage. Use best weapon modules you have at the moment, example: you studied tier 1 weapons, but found via curiosity a t2/t3 weapon module, make early attacker ships using that module, even if enemy has some sort of defense. That early into the game using support ships is ineffective as they do not provide much.

They are strong enough to fight the early and 4 of t1 ships have enough manpower to siege their HQ.

Endless space 2 ships attack