Some of the heavy-hitters are viable, though you need to be careful.  The Marza, Kortul, and Vulkoras are all workable openers, but far more risky than your conventional carrier or colonizer opener.

Rapid colonization will pay off very quickly.  There's nothing wrong with pursuing heavy cruisers, but you should be building up a large empire while you're doing it.  Three planets will not be able to support a very large fleet at all, so you'll get steamrolled regardless of what units you're making.

Every map and scenario is somewhat different.  Generally speaking, empires with 2-4 planets are what I'd call "fledgling".  They're going to have serious logistical limitations and their economy simply won't be able to support a large fleet.  On some maps, that is perfectly normal, while on others you can't expect to survive very long like this.  In the short-term, you can get away with almost anything, but in the long-term a 2-3 planet disadvantage is usually insurmountable.

The light frigate is a sub-par unit type.  Its redeeming quality is speed and mobility, but by cost its damage is quite low for a dedicated combat unit, more comparable with the scout than the long-range frigates.

The light frigate is great for chasing down support units, including carriers and flaks.  It's also pretty resistant to fighters and bombers.  Beyond that, it's not a good unit to make the bulk of your army out of. 

I should also point out that "light frigate" is a misnomer.  It's actually a medium-type unit and resistant to many types of attacks that deal extra damage to light targets.

Gardas (and flaks in general) are exceptional units.  The have great damage output against lightly armoured frigates (again, the light frigate isn't actually a "light" frigate) and they have absolutely awe-inspiring durability plus favourable heavy armour type.  To top it off, they come at a very reasonable cost.  There's just no reason not to mix these into your fleet.

Fighters aren't bad, but since they get cleaned up by enemy flaks quite efficiently, you can't really count on them in a close-range frigate battle.  In larger more "flighty" scenarios where you can weave outside of the enemy's weapon range fighters excel, but if you fly over a dense thicket of flak expect to lose most of them.

All depends; usually the bomber is favoured unit type, since it packs more punch in the first few moments of battle.  For longevity, you'll be leaning on frigates instead of strike craft, so fighters are used sparingly.

Hoshikos Hoshikos Hoshikos!  This is the holy grail of the TEC faction!

Ogrovs are also very nice, too, easily the best starbase killing weapon out there.  This gives TEC an offensive reliability that the other factions can't get.

Yup.

Well all the things you've learned so far are good, so on to the questions.

1. LFs are a tricky unit to use right. While everyone (save perhaps Vasari) uses a few of them to quickly defeat militia early on in the game, after that they are quickly eclipsed by LRF (which are both excellent "tank" units and counter LF hard). Thus since most fleet will have a fairly large LRF component, they are rarely used.

That said, if you find yourself fighting large amounts of carrier cruisers or repair cruisers, you'll want to bring some of these guys out again. Their speed quickly allows them to catch carriers and their abilities can shut down repair cruisers. Advent LFs can also dub as fleet support with transfer antimatter.

2. While fighters are technically the best against strikecraft, the fact that Flak frigates can destroy them so effectively means against balanced fleets they often are unable to do their job. You'll always want some to keep enemy fighters off your bombers, but the latter are where most of your strikecraft firepower comes from. The fact that bombers are the ideal counter to capital ships, heavy cruisers and starbases are a bonus.

If you happen to be fighting a fleet with a large composition of bombers or LRFs with relatively few flaks however, this is just asking for you to switch over to fighters.

3. TEC's trump cards so to speak are the Hoshiko (best repair cruiser in the game), LRMs (arguably the best LRF in the game), Akkan Battlecruiser (best colonization bonus for early game economy, plus armistice a great ultimate ability), Marza Dreadnought (just for its ultimate ability missile barrage), early trade ports (just don't invest in them until you have enough planets and the forces to protect them) and very late game pervasive economy (never have to worry about credits again) and the many techs that reduce ship build time.

Also their ships tend are either first or a close second in the most effective in the stats/fleet supply ratio. However, they lack many of the awesome abilities that the Advent and Vasari have. Thus they have an excellent rush/early game, but late game they will struggle to compete and will have to rely on force of numbers.

4. I like to put my starbases near my other orbital structures (labs/trade ports/extractors), so that all of these can be covered by multiple repair bays and hangar flak cannons, while the starbase protects against fleets. There is nothing keeping the enemy from going around. If they leave the planet without destroying the starbase though, they will lose all their antimatter and 30% of their health, leaving them sitting ducks if you have a fleet of your own or another starbase waiting for them. As it is the AI rarely bypass planets, but other players often will.

They were bugged in version 1.181 and dealt extra damage.  When that bug got fixed, the unit we were left with was quite weak.  Not a bad unit, but definitely the weakest of the pack.

Very much so.  Light Frigate is weak against dedicated combat frigates, but pretty much impervious against everything else.  Strike craft deal low damage against them, flak frigates deal low damage against them, support cruisers get cleaned up quite nicely by them, and they're much too fast for carriers to even attempt to out-run them.  If the enemy doesn't have a sufficient number of dedicated combat units, light frigates can be quite nasty.

A lot of the fundamentals are the same, and some unit types are very similar.   The biggest differences are the capital ships and support cruisers, which feature wildly diverging special abilities.  The TEC has the strongest early-game of the three factions due to generally more cost-effective units, but once you hit mature fleets the Advent and Vasari come into their own.

Here's a great combo for Advent:  Progenitor Mothership + Iconus Guardian.  The Progenitor has an ability called "shield regeneration" which will restore shield points to every nearby friendly unit.  The Iconus Guardian has an ability called "shield projection" which allows it to absorb some of the damage other nearby units are receiving.  Use about half a dozen Iconus (the ability doesn't stack, so rotate the usage with 2-3 active at a time; don't have all of them activate it at once) to absorb damage, then use the Progenitor to keep their shields topped up.  This combo takes more investment than hoshikos, but it scales better into the late-game and makes your fleet very resilient against damage.

I'm a big fan of light frigates, for a number of reasons:

#1) They're cheap! Costing only metal and credits, you can field a great deal of them, saving crystal for research and structures. You're going to be losing ships to focus fire, you can't really avoid it. What would you rather have your enemy tunneling through? Your cheap as dirt Disciples or your kinda pricey Illuminators?

#2) While they don't compare favorably to Heavy Frigates and LRFs, they tear up support cruisers, flaks and carriers, and given their cost, they're not half-bad against other unit types.

#3) A generous complement of fighters will admirably cover their weaknesses in the early game. This is crucial. Nobody's going to get heavy frigates til midgame at the earliest, so a healthy mix of fighters and light frigates can do surprisingly well.

#4) They're FAST. This gets overlooked quite a bit, imo. Light frigates have the ability to chase down slower vessels and punish them for retreating, and avoid slower formations altogether.

#5) Their abilities. Mid-game, light frigates can unlock some very useful abilities that mess with your enemy's antimatter. The Disciple ability in particular is fiendish, since it robs your enemies of antimatter, and transfers it to your own fleet.

Of the games I have played, I have NEVER had problems keeping my metal income up, especially early on. I often have used my metal surplus to get more credits, I can count the number of times I've sold crystal on my fingers, on the other hand, and I've lost count of the times I've had to buy crystal to keep buying research, ships, structures, etc. Yes, there's lots of structures and techs that cost more metal than crystal, but I've found crystal to be much more precious.

That depends greatly on the unit, and on the survivability of your LRFs. Equalized for population, fighters burn LRFs at roughly the same rate that LRFs burn LFs. The difference is that after flak has dispatched the fighter cover, the surviving LFs can disengage from the battle and regenerate their squadrons for antimatter, while the LRF-using player will have to replace his ships with cash. The bottom line is that in order to protect their LRFs from fighter attacks, they need to invest heavily in flak, which dilutes fleet firepower considerably.

What makes the LRF spam so popular is that they're much stronger against caps and structures, and the late-game power of phase missiles in the case of Vasari, and rightly so. If you want to pick off a capital ship, fighters and LFs are not going to do the business, but they CAN starve the enemy fleet of antimatter and brutalize enemy support ships, such as carriers, support cruisers and flak.

I'm not trying to present light frigates as the answer to all your fleet supply issues, but I do think they get a bad rap as being 'underpowered'.

The list of things that have primarily a crystal cost is actually quite slim.  The only significant ones are technologies at the 3rd lab level or higher, trade ports, and support cruisers.  That's it.

If you're doing a primarily military opener, you may not even go above the 2-lab level, your primary economic costs are going to be colonizing planets (costs about twice as much metal as crystal), and your going to be spamming most military units until you have a certain bulk.  LRF-type units cost about twice as much metal as crystal, so they stay within that 2:1 sweet spot that represents the usual early-game resource distribution.

If you're going for a more economic opener then yes, you will invariably be short on crystal.  However, for a rush opener I find myself short on crystal about as often as I find myself short on metal.  The fact is that a rush-game is very metal intensive but not very crystal intensive once you've put down your labs and researched the LRM.

Your fighters are going to be busy with the enemy strike craft coming off of their carrier cap.  Unless you have more capital carriers than your opponent, don't expect to gain any significant advantage here.  Carrier cruisers are out of the question; if you fast-track these, you're leaving yourself quite vulnerable to a LF-based counter.  If you do sink the (rather large) amount of cash necessary to get an extra carrier or two, you opponent can mix in a few flaks for a fraction of this cost and have a very balanced fleet that will roll anything LF-based.

Back in 1.181 you could definitely fight off LRF-based fleets and support LF by using scouts.  These were cheap and complemented your fighters nicely.  Scouts don't have the firepower to do this effectively anymore.

If we're talking about 10 or so LRF, then I'd agree with you, but I wouldn't commit my LRF to a fight where they'd be picked off so effortlessly.  A real rush will hit with a larger force, more in the range of 30-40 LRM or 25-35 assailants.  Your fighters simply won't be able to pick them off fast enough to make a difference.  Either I'll have already rolled your fleet by sheer attrition, or my own fighters will have cleaned up your's (and if I'm Vasari, I'll be scrambling like mad).

Nope; they don't counter flaks as nicely as you might like.  Given enough time they will clean them up, but the flak is a very tough unit and it's going to take more than a little bit of damage to knock out.  Great hull, great armor, and so long as I don't skimp on LRF your light frigates will be cleaned up long before my flaks are.

I'd agree with that.  My point is, their niche does not exist against a primarily LRF-based fleet.  If your enemy is bringing out oodles of support cruisers or kiting carriers, LF are a great choice.  If they're trying to get in your face with LRF, this is pretty much the worst unit you can be building.  Advent is really the only faction which can even consider lingering at the 0-tech level, and even then hitting the defense vessel early is a high priority to give them something else to fall back on.

Cost for cost, carriers are just too fragile.  You have to carefully kite them even to beat LRF (the unit they're supposedly "countering") and there's largely nothing you can do this early if the enemy sends half a dozen LF to hunt it down.   I'm of the opinion that if you want extra strike craft early on, you bite the bullet and get a second carrier cap.  Faster, tougher, gets special abilities, doesn't have antimatter issues, has weapons of its own... great deal overall.

Inexpensive flaks are tough enough to take punishment from LF, but expensive carriers are not.