I find myself, in this new beta, having an extremely difficult time with ship defences. Only in the later game i find myself being able to not lose 50% of my ships attacking the enemy. They are too large and do too little. Also it makes smaller ships even more worthless as i find them always dying in 1-2 hits.

Only in the late game when I have 6-10 point defences and huge ships do i find my ships actually being able to take hits, otherwise its a problem. Where i can put weapons that, near the beginning of the game, do 4 damage for 8-10 space i can only put defences that protect 1-2 at 10 or more.