Ever thought of a balanced starship?

Put your best missile, point defense, with 5 to 6 racks. Add up to 100 point defense beam weapons to take care of the enemy missiles and fighters (phaser work best, hard beams second best, use improved weapons and both miniaturisations). Load about 10 fighters, not too big (phaser if available). Add shield (small or medium) and other things like ecm, eccm, cloaking. Don't try to exceed a speed of 2000 but use your best engines. Space left? Add some long distance beam weapons like phasers, dark energy beams or similar in your best spinal mount.

Classify this ship as recon and what have you got? One all-purpose ship that can fill up recon armadas to full strength and deal with even more numerous opponents, combining indirect fire, missile defense and target saturation. No more fretting about what armadas to form, and how to combine the ships.