Several notes to help you get more efficient:
- Use your artillery golem to snipe down the carriers if they don't deploy immediately. He's also useful on offence to sit around and snipe dangerous large ships, ion cannons, guardposts, etc.
- Make a science lab fleet and send them over to the two planets Parje and Yaqipvil.
- Add your main dock to the control group. This gives the ships that dock produces membership in the group. Not in tutorials because introduced much later.
- Since you're using parasites, turn on "reclaimed ships rally to rally post" and make rally posts in clear central locations. You can more easily get your freebies organised this way. You can also make a mobile rally post to take with group-1 if you want.
- Riot Starship mark-II should always have tazers installed.
- (suggestion) Keep a control group or two of remains builders and engineers to recover systems faster.
- Bring all your enclaves with you, they are better on the attack as they produce drones to soak enemy attention.
- Move your forcefield locations. Tip: forcefields over wormholes stop most enemy ships (ones that are not immune) from going into them but not out of them. This should help you concentrate defenses on Muum (and a bit on Wepijied).
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Overall strategy:
- Since you have lots of parasite unlocks, I suggest you try to use it to collect some AI ships first. For example Lyleba has useful ships and won't attract additional defenders. Build your fleet from the AI defenders until you can take out the top section (if you so wish).
- Now for energy. There are too many defenses where you don't need them. Miniforts takes up a lot of energy, for example. Pause the game and scan your back areas, eliminating any defenses you haven't used. You've almost clear the top left triangle of three systems, so defense along the long string are unnecessary. You can always rebuild anything that is replacable. You need those extra energy to maintain the reclaimed ships in the point above. More mobile power is better in this case than stationary one.
I personally think you have too many matter converters feeding into defense and delaying your progress, but this is a personal choice. Everything outside of Muum is technically sacrificeable, once you build all your Flak Turret-Vs on Muum. I would personally use only logistics (far far away), snipers, and spider turrets on a few outlying planets to separate the enemy ships as they pour in. Each could have a mark-I forcefield (you'll need to unlock the hardened FF-Is, which will give you another 10.)
- Where to go from here: You already have a solid base and don't need to try to conquer the whole galaxy. The standard way to play from here is to start neutering planets to clear the way for planet hopping. Whenever you can, clear out guardposts on planets that pose a danger, especially on the light orange AI planets as they don't have wormhole guardposts. This slows down buildup a lot. (Can ignore counterattacks if you wish.) Note that your artillery golem will take out wormhole guardposts / AI Eyes in 4 shots as well (I used to do this all the time). It might be slow, but you can take a group of engineers with it to top up its health.
Then regroup your mark-II scouts and send them deep into AI territory to see what else is out there. There's definitely more golems, unless you've lost them.
If you can stockpile the resources, you can send a mobile construction fleet (engineers, colony ships, mobile space docks, mobile builders (etc), plus cloaker starships to help them live), pick off just a planet containing that golem, and rebuild it quickly. You can send things like raid starships to clear out the tachyon guardposts along the way - although it may be easier to use your fleet as a big bludgeon to clear out things on the way.
You'll probably want to save up hacking points and hack the advanced factory / starship constructor at this point. I don't know if you can afford to defend them.
