[Parasite]

I found getting troops to land on and capture a planet very hard to master after doing it manually. Now though I use it almost be second nature. Practice on the AI. Nothing worse than losing a game except losing because of a stupid or incorrect firing setting.

This is an easy way, there are more complex ways.

Set the freighter to type "troop ship". There are harder ways to do this like setting it to another strategy then setting that ship strategy to include "drop troops". Ignore that for now.

Don't put weapons on the transport. Bring other ships in a fleet to kill them. Something inside the settings sets a troop ship to hide in the corner and not fire until the WPs are dead. Let the other ships kill them. Weapons on the freighter will fire on your run in to land and you may just kill everyone on the ground before you can get there. This last may have been changed in a patch.

Set your fleet to "Capture Planet". It must have a "troop transport" ship with troops in it. Don't try any fancy stuff like setting strategies to "Do not fire on planets" until you have more experience. "Break formation" is a good thing.

The ships with weapons will try to destroy the WPs. Once the WPs (or all other ships) are gone, the transport will start the run in to the planet. If you have a slow ship and/or the battle takes a while, it may not make it in time to the surface.

Once this is perfected, advanced orders like "Attack Planet", "Load troop", "attack next planet" can be done. this can capture more than one planet a turn.

For my long range missle ships I use a "Long Range" primary strategy, and a "Don't get hurt" secondary strategy. It helps keep me out of range of their weapons. But put one little ripper beam in a normal mount on the shieldless missle baseship and it will happly dive into combat at range one against 20 other ships. Standard practice is to design the ships to fight the stratigies and fit the strategies for the design.

(Note: I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a missile baseship. I can neither confirm nor deny that a missile baseship is even a good design.)