The Cylons had had a fair amount of space experience before their war with the Colonials, and this experience taught them the value of lots of small space fighters, with a large mothership to transport them.

Unlike the Colonials though, they did not neglect their Baseships to just holding pens for the fighters. Instead they armed them with powerful Mega Pulsar weapons specifically for use against other ships or enemy installations, thus making the ships exceptionally powerful.

However A Cylon fleet has a lot less variety in it than a Colonial Fleet. To the Cylons, all you need are Baseships and Raiders. The Raiders are the main strike force of the fleet, and deal with scouting, patrolling, attack and defence. They are inferior to the Colonial Viper.
The Baseship is the mother ship of the fleet, large and slow, but carrying a massive amount of fighters and heavy firepower, it is more than an equal for a Battlestar.

On the whole though, Cylons win through numbers and superior firepower, and they tend to make sure reinforcements are always present.

The Cylons, like the Colonials, have a very slow design philosophy. In the entire conflict, only a handful of different designs were actually present, but the variants of those designs were numerous and fulfilled many different functions.

A quick note on Cylon Shuttles:
To be honest, I do not actually know if Cylons use shuttles at all. Their main personel mover is the Raider, and it appears that even high ranking officials use the Raider as their prime mode of transport. So why include shuttles on the SSD's?
Well, a Raider may be fine for the transport of small amounts of troops, but for a large scale ground assault, a huge amount of Raiders would be required, and while I have no doubt that the Cylons could amass such a force, for ground actions, it would be impractical, simply for the fact that Raiders can not really carry equipment and supplies. And if they can not, how does a Baseship get refurbished with the goods that it needs? So I have included a few shuttles for practical reasons.

Relative ship sizes:

Cylon ship comparison chart