There are three aspects to newbie perpetuum fighting: range control, cover, and damagetypes. Probably, the same aspects apply to upper-level fighting.

First, range control. Range control is the ability to pick what range the fight will be at - in newbie fights, this is mostly being faster than your opponent, though in principle being able to traverse higher slopes than your opponent would also be range control. Normally, you need range control just to start the fight - except if your opponent is always hanging around in one location or traversing a predictable route.

Second, cover. There are three kinds of cover, range, los, and lock cover. You can achieve total range cover by staying outside their optimum+falloff firing distance, and partial range cover by staying outside their optimum firing distance. LOS cover is mountains and trees (while the trees last). It is more useful against LOS weapons (lasers and railguns), but missiles do have flight paths too. Finally, in order to be shot at, you must first be locked; while your opponent does not have a lock, you have lock cover.

Third, damage types. This is rock-paper-scissors, or rather lasers-railguns-missiles. The three are not perfectly symmetrical, but they're still fairly balanced - lasers are longest range, railgun bots are fastest, missiles can shoot around corners. Lasers are slowest, missiles have most expensive ammo.  Armor hardeners can cover your vulnerable damage type, and chemical damage (the fourth type) is most effective against such "weakest-point-hardened" bots.

I believe the standard newbie strategy is to achieve range control via navigation, not fitting too much, and the top speed of the arkhe, which is pretty decent. Then achieve lock cover by repeatedly ducking out beyond your opponents locking range. This would normally break your lock as well, but you increase lock range with a sensor amp. You're given a standard sensor amp during the tutorial, and syn-tec amps (harder but still possible to use) are seeded at the low price of 9 NIC. This strategy is effective against rookie damage dealers of all three types; it fails against bots with large locking ranges (ewar bots).

In more advanced group combat I suspect there are at least six standard roles - tackler, who specializes in range control battles and fits demobilizer, damage dealers of each major type, and a lockbreaker who uses ECM to provide lock cover, and industry. Industry are part of the fight because presumably the fight is about something - mining something, harvesting something, or freighting something somewhere. They're the VIPs or hostages of the scenario (and they might fit energy transfer or armor repair too, but that's a secondary aspect).