Hi!

I use my tiny ships as some kind of fighter. For example when i build fleets with beam weapons, i build tiny ships with missles or rail guns. For every fleet i build one "squadron" of fighters. So it's not easy for the Ai to build a good defense. In my last game the AI builds three different defences on there ships because of that tactic. (Now they have not so much space for weapons on there ships).

And i use in every of my systems a military starbase.

Greetings from Germany
Speedy

I don't agree that only cargo and large+ hulls should be allowed to use the various transport modules.

A good example why would be to think of star wars and how there are a large number of various sized transports in that universe. Like the unstandard Millenium Falcon, to the trully Gigantic bulk freighters.

With Da we now have an idea of how many crew members are on each ship size so when I design a tiny hull Transport I get to thinking about a 2 crewman ship hauling around a bunch of crap to be sold off at some god forsaken alien world.

Angelon

Hmmmm, I wonder why I only have a 5 game winner button, when I have actuley won 10 games? Unless it is because I am now at normal and 5 of my wins were at beginner, think that is it?

I use the tinys all the time, actually. I use them as scouts in the early game - long range, to try and contact every other race as early as possible. When I have, I set them all to auto explore. By the sensors 3 stage, my economy's pretty good, and I can upgrade them to survey scouts. They're spread all over the map, so even though I could make bigger, faster survey ships back home, the scout that's already on the other side of the map will still get to the anomaly faster than the small hull or cargo hull which has to cross an entire map to get to that same anomaly.

When the anomalies run out, I set them again to auto explore.

When I've pretty much discovered the entire map, my economy's normally going very strong, and it's faster to just upgrade those scouts to carry constructors than it is to waste a turn with a planet's starbase building a cheap constructor. Depends on my miniturization, but a tiny with a constructor module, plus sometimes an engine, no defenses, it does the job, and only costs 200 or 300 per ship. Then I have a huge swarm to constructors - whether they then come back home for economy bases, or shore up my borders with influence bases, etc. I'll even use them up back home, if I don't need the other two, setting up military bases with ship speed +2/-2, just to speed up getting attack ships out of my territory, and to slow down enemy fleets coming in.

Considering I can quickly get up to the point where I can, when I don't need my planets for military, pump out tinys with constructors and a single engine in a single turn, they're incredably useful - I normally end up with a whole range of fully maxed starbases of all sorts spread around my mid-game territory.

I thought it was kind of cheesy myself at first, but that is the way the game and the combat system is designed really.

Frankly, if I had things 'my way' so to speak, weapon power would scale with hull size, and so would transport ability. A tiny hull shouldn't be able to transport more than 50 troops. I think that would be reasonable on a space vessel, and I also take issue with tiny hulls mounting oodles of super-tech weapons that puts them on pairty with much large hull ships that have slightly less tech.

However, that's all been hashed over and over again. (And over and over and over)

To be honest, I see tiny ships as the most important hull design next to huge and cargo. Tiny ships for me are very efficient once you max out miniturization, seeing as everything takes up less space for tinies than anything else, although I usually do not put engines on my tiny fighters I usually play the Yor with influence bonuses, and with speed technologies they still move faster than enemies in my territory. I like the tiny ships because planets with just 2 factories can still churn them out instead of taking a hundred turns creating one of my capital ships. In my opinion, tinies counter the huge hulled ships.

ALL ships have a minimum speed of 1, regardless of what is or isn't on them or any starbases trying to modify their speed.

On the flip side, jangerel, the difference in the difficulty of building the ships would be phenomenal, and would be reflected in the cost. Tiny ships could basically be built on the planet and then shipped off into orbit all at once, whereas a heavy fighter or, worse yet, any of the capital ships would probably need to be constructed in orbit, with a significant cost being seen in ferrying the necessary components off the planet. We don't really see the ship cost reflect this... a same generation tiny and heavy fighter will see a significant advantage in damage and hit points go to the heavy fighter, but the heavy fighter will cost much less for the effectiveness it boasts. As such, only the heaviest ship that a civilisation can build is efficient enough for use.

Actually, thats a fault on the AI's part very often, as well. They'll have large hulls, but will mix them in with inferior craft, blunting their combat advantage.

But they make great little starbase destroyers!

Nothing like an 'Eclectic'-class combat constructor. Space the enemy resource starbase and deploy your own in the same turn

HUH. I'll keep that in mind... with a speed ability bonus, the lack of engines would be very quickly offset by how much cheaper the ships would be.

I'm trying that next time!

More important, I'd think, is having cheap constructors. The colony ships being that cheap could be too harsh on the homeworld population... though you'd see a substantial benefit in simply being able to shift production to research and social production as well.

For a super breeder, massed colony ships like that could be a fantastic strategy.

Speaking of Super Breeder, massed cheap troop transports is starting to look good. It's so easy to hit 99% approval or the farm limit with those guys, it helps just to pull off 1 billion and take their sweet time travelling somewhere.