special thanks for solon64 for making this guide. (i am not writing this)

this guide cover how to use FTL more effeciently, depending of empire/traits.

Gates:

Incredibly useful in so many ways. The gates themselves can be designed to be heavily armed fortresses in their own right, or you can make them very small and easy to produce so that once you've established a beachhead in enemy territory with one production planet, even with only one or two factories you can slap a gate out quickly and reinforce with huge slow fleets from across the galaxy.

They also count as connecting different trade zones, so they're essentially an improvement over commerce stations in every way. And they're mobile! And if you play as the Mono, your FTL costs to transport citizens are reduced to almost nothing.

The downsides are, as mentioned, the drain to FTL resource while they're active, but this is EASILY made up for by developing even one FTL crystals planet. Make sure you guard your FTL crystal planet well!

Slipstreams:

As already mentioned, late game dedicated slipstream vessels can make slips last for hours. It's a one time FTL cost for INSTANT travel over long distances. Downsides are that they don't count for trade zone connection, and your enemy can use them just as easily as you can.

I've actually found that slipstreams are BETTER when they don't last as long, for that reason. Slip in, do your damage, then slip back out and it's like you were never there, minus the glassed infrastructure and captured planets of course.

Unfortunately, slipstreams tend to be very expensive over long distances, and the inaccuracy means they aren't good for precision strikes. I'm not a huge fan of slipstreams to be honest, too expensive and inaccurate and they require dedicated slipstream vessels to go along with every fleet you intend to use for raiding. Destroy the slipstream generators and you leave the enemy force stranded.

Hyperdrives:

Very versatile. Expensive, as every ship jumping costs a larger amount of FTL based on its mass. Requires a huge dedication of hexes in ship design to get any reasonable jump speed. That said, they're great for very quick reaction forces to jump from a nearby location to defend, so there's that.

Just a bit too expensive in the long run, in my opinion, but you can almost always have a fleet ready to react to incursions, and they're usable in enemy territory too, to escape from a larger enemy fleet and interdict enemy trade routes then flee.

Fling Beacons:

I'll admit, I don't like them. Yes, you can launch any fleet very cheaply to anywhere in the galaxy in 25 seconds, at an affordable rate, but you're tied to having those fleets based around the fling beacons only, so it sort of leads to you making a dedicated, immobile staging area and launching strikes from there and there only, unless you want to pay a very large maintenance cost to have several fling beacons.

There are some awesome tricks though that make flings really devious. Orbital defense stations are normally immobile but are able to be flung for fairly cheap as stated, so you can make a HUGE orbital, stack it with guns and armor for days, and fling it right into the heart of enemy territory. It will cause havoc, interdict trade vessels, and generally be a huge pain to get rid of, and its maintenance is negligible. Very fun.

Defense stations themselves can be given a fling core to be used as fling bases, they can't fling themselves, but they can be flung, so you can fling a fleet and one of these fling stations with them so you can escape back home at the cost of only the small, cheap, quickly built fling base.

I just find fling beacons to typically be too defensive in nature for my liking. But that's just me.