And likely at a considerable distance, since the relative velocity between two approaching spaceships would be on the order of what, tens of thousands of miles per hour? That would make close-quarters combat problematic, to say the least.
I think David Weber's Honor Harrington series gets this pretty well: two hostile spaceships would start throwing everything they have at each other while millions of miles apart. The Horatio Hornblower-style close-in battles you see on film are movie- and audience-friendly, but ignore the realities of a zero-gee vacuum environment.
Indeed. One of the things I dislike in most versions of space battles that you read about or see onscreen, is that no one really seems to comprehend this part. Most space vessels we have to worry about at this point in our physics understanding and general capabilities is that our space vessels will be traveling very fast indeed. Fighter craft individual battles are unlikely for several reasons given the current state of our technologies.
One of the things they miss in the so-called space battles is that the individual craft need strong attitude jets to maneuver in several directions besides the attack vector. Shooting in along a direct path is a sure invitation to become nothing more than a fast-moving debris field in very short order. You need to be able to keep jinking around randomly to minimize the chances of being hit by an energy weapon or kinetic projectile like a bullet.
By the same token, most -strike that; ALL of the missiles we have available at this time would be useless in space unless we were firing on orbital satellites or other of the current small platforms we have in space. Anything that can move, like a manned vehicle, can simply alter its trajectory and the missile would simply sail on by since it can only travel upon the direction it was fired along. The new generation of actual space-capable missiles would also need jets to allow them to maneuver in more than one direction.
Until we develop different methods of traveling in space, these are just a few of the difficulties we will need to address, and there is no guarantee that other spacefaring civilizations will have exactly the same problems we would face if a confrontation happened to occur.