So far I made little progress in the campaign in the past few days. Mostly popping cylon moles and building up additional fleets. I have 3 out and it took me ridiculously long to realize I can level up officers without exp by spending RP. Of course, RP is needed for unlocking tech, but in hindsight besides Vipers MK II, the Adamant and Artemis I wouldn't say tech is a must have. Speaking of which some thoughts on strategy so far in the campaign.
The most non-obvious thing in the game is knowing where the guns are placed and that apparently it is best to be a bit lower than the enemy with the Artemis, Minotaur and Adamant to have more of the guns firing. Sadly the game lacks a proper manual on what ships have what capabilities and there is no wiki.
The Adamant is by far the best fleet filler in the campaign. It is reasonably fast and manuverable, the broadside damage is good and it has a munitions slot although with a 3 turn reloading time. Oh and of course you get a squadron slot for vipers. The tylium cost is very good for what you get. Also, because the AI likes to focus high point value targets, they don't become useless later on as they rarely get fired upon as long as the Cylons see anything more expensive than an Adamant. I fly them into crossfire from 3-5 Arachnes and Revenants and they almost never get shot because an Artemis is always more attractive for the toasters.
The Artemis is a bit underrated by some. Sure, point for point the Adamant is more cost-effective but then you hit the 7 ship per fleet limit and cost effectiveness matters little when Cylons jump in 9 ships in a battle. The firepower from its guns is decent and it has long range artillery guns (just don't expect them to hit shit without posture set to maximum attack). Two squadrons is the biggest advantage of this ship, as Viper MK II win battles. You get flak capability (although this disables all non-artillery guns on it when enabled) and its a Cylon magnet, so you can use it to bait missiles after Arachnes show up. Also you get a munitions slot that reloads in 2 turns.
Manticores stop becoming useful after Arachne's show up. The problem is that cost-effectiveness matters little when the Cylons field fleets larger numerically than you can filled with big scary ships with big scary missiles and lots of guns.
Minotaurs are arguably useless. The main problem here is that having guns is nice but engaging in a slug-fest is something you want to prolong as long as possible (Cylon doctrine of long range missiles and fighters also seems to be best for Colonials). Also they are kind of a Cylon magnet, but without the flaks, artillery or fighters that make an Artemis useful even if it needs to focus on getting killed. Its advantage is that you get guns, and only guns, cheaply. But cheap fleets don't win fights when the Cylons have apparently a post-scarcity economy centred around total war.
Rangers are good, but they run into the problem of being a Cylon magnet. Still, two munitions slot with the lowest munition reload time is very good and its disadvantage can be mitigated by simply having it sit way in the back, with a spare fighter squadron, firing missiles at targets identified by other ships.
I do not have Atlases yet but they seem to be weak on paper which I will note below. Yes two viper squadrons sound nice. Then again Vipers are the best weapon in the game. I will have to see if 2 vipers is better than an Archer with two salvos.
Overall, as far as facing the Chrome Centurions in their Spaceships is concerned, it seems the Colonials best bet in the Campaign is not to engage them directly until the very last moment. Vipers are superior to Raiders and outside of Raiders Cylon anti-fighter capability simply does not exist. Its just a question of sending out vipers ASAP and blobbing them together into a death cloud. Kill as much crap as possible before the Cylons even fire one shot at anything other than a viper. I rarely see viper II drop below 30 hull out of 32, if they do it is because they flew into my own flak field.
The biggest threat from the Cylons are their missiles first, guns second. Well ok, there are heavy raiders, Nemesis' hacking and Wardriver hacking as well. Also raiders do hurt if you let them get into firing range. But the thing is, strike craft are easy to manage. The nemesis can be annoying but it needs to get into your gun range first and it is easier to kill than Revenants and Arachnes which you do not want to get close. But if there is one thing that made for the biggest spike in difficulty, is fleets full of Revenants and Arachnes. Arachnes seem to be able to fire missiles every turn. Face 5 of them and the sheer amount of missiles is difficult to manage. And their guns do hurt, not as much as the Revenant, but they hurt. The only way to really combat them effectively is to not let them get a lock and kill them with vipers. Or to kill off their Revenant escort with Viper mk IIs and charge in with battlestars acting as missile bait with flaks on. Well, I guess PCMs and Sweepers also work but I do not have those yet.
I think swapping the Artemis munitions slot from missiles to a PCM might be a good idea, but I would have to see how it work in action.
IMO Revenants and Arachnes are by far much more difficult to manage than basestars. For basestars viper defence when missiles were launched was enough. Basestar guns are not very threatening so all you need to do is kill missiles and close the distance. With Revenants you want to pound them from as far away as possible, with Arachnes you want to simply kill them ASAP.
Contrary to what the tooltips say I cannot add a 7th ship to a fleet with the Daidalos in it. Although even if I could I still think the two extra vipers are not worth the inflexibility and risk of bringing Daidalos to battle from mid-game onwards. Early on those two squadrons are a significant advantage. But after Cylon task forces get larger babysitting the thing becomes tedious. Furthermore you cannot auto-resolve battles where the Daidalos is present and there's lots of tedious toaster mole popping going on.
Also there's a roadmap published by the devs for some changes in upcoming patches. Campaign configuration and retreat jumps are the two most needed ones IMO. I also wouldn't mind attrition as long as it also applied to Cylons and their repair bases could be destroyed. With FTL retreating this could open up some new strategy to dealing with Cylon blobs. In Stardrive 2 I likes to build ships with railguns and fighters, kill as much as possible from long range and retreat before the enemy moved into range of his guns
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- Campaign configuration. To make the campaign more challenging, we'll look at options for the campaign, such as carrying over damage into subsequent battles, and requiring repairs to be undertaken from the war room. The intention is that you will be able to choose whether you want these options or not, so you can configure the level of challenge from the campaign to suit your play style and need for punishment.
- Colonial fleets in skirmish. Player created Cylons fleets will be available in offline Skirmish from the next update (1.0.5), and we'd like to make Colonial fleets an option too. Most of the work for this is to write AI for the Colonial specific abilities, like Flak, Sweeper Chaff Clouds, Posture, etc.
- More skirmish modes (MP and Offline). Presently, Skirmish battles - both multiplayer and offline - have a single objective, which is to destroy all of the other players ships. We will look at adding more objectives and modes to make skirmish battles as varied and interesting as possible.
- Battle damage. We'll look into ways to show progressive damage to a ship before it's destroyed.
- Fighter AI improvements. It's been noted that Cylon fighters rarely engage with Vipers once they have a capital ship target. We'll intend to look at ways to make Cylon fighters more of a menace on the battlefield.
- Armour. Some players have asked questions about how the armour system works, with respect to which section is taking damage. We'll look at how we can make that a bit clearer in battles.
- Emergency jump during battles. This has been requested a lot, and is on the radar. It's a function that changes the balance of the game significantly, so requires careful design to avoid unintended consequences.
- Balancing. With any tactical battle game - particularly one with multiplayer - balancing is an ongoing task. We are watching the discussions carefully and will continue to make adjustments to the units to ensure the game is properly balanced.
side of mouse and keyboard. And that also mean no MP for me if i have just a 0,000091% chance of stumbling on an XboX user 
Yes, there is friendly fire.
