Hah! Great fun. I've found the strategy for long-term survival is simply to stay in the spawning point, spin, and fire as many rounds as possible. I suspect this is because the damage you take for hitting another ship's shields is set high enough that the probability of taking bullet damage is roughly constant whether moving or staying in place, while the probability of taking damage while moving is much higher than that of taking damage while staying in place.
Anyone with a more careful attitude towards quantitative analysis than I care to verify?
If these were humans, a standing-still ship would attract more aggression as an easy target, but bots don't seem to care about that, so it should be good option for maximizing kills/deaths. However, it takes a long time to kill anyone without active movement – hunting down near-dead ships is the best way to get best kills/minute. (and by hunting down i mean crashing into them of course, as well as point-blank fire).
Anyone with a more careful attitude towards quantitative analysis than I care to verify?