I stink at ship building. Need help.

The wars are based on the rock/paper/scissors concept. If you build your ships with all armor and your enemies are stacked with missiles, you will lose those battles. Also, your posting on face value looks like you didn't have any attack hardware. I find that hard to believe, but I'll state the obvious anyway: you need to have weapons to do damage. You could have 100 values in every defensive category, but that just means it takes longer for them to destroy you. Find out what defensive measure is lacking on the AI ships and put the corresponding attack gear on yours. You performance should improve after that.

Hi!

You may find useful info on wiki about https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Ship_design and https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Ship_combat.

IMO in DL are defenses more usefull than in other game versions, because in DL ships attack separately, so attacked ship rolls for each attack with full defenses. In DA and TA all ships in a fleet attack the same target, depleting terget's defenses. So in DL you need on a single ship about 150% defenses of opponent's average ship's attack. In DA An TA you need defenses ~75% of opponent's FLEET attack to be efficiently covered. In late game of DA and TA that's hard, with ultimate weapons impossible.

And ofc. you need enough weapons to "burn" through their defenses and deal more damage to them, than they do to you.

BR,  Iztok