Opening moves?

[jfp3]

Great offering there Z. This is the type of info that helps get us Noobs going with the game. 2 Questions:

At what point should one consider taking on single Pirates? What ship setup for a Merchant for instance?

and

When one does the RTS elements, do Robots made for "repair" do those repairs themselves or do you need to micro manage them? I wonder about this because the battles seem to go quite fast (I've only done the training one so far) and it seems it would be really rough to micromanage much of anything.

Anyone else have something to add here?