Tiny Ships: Any use for them?

You could drop the engine in favor of more weapons and use them strictly for orbital defense.

I use them strictly for scouting, I can't see any purpose for them otherwise. It's kind of a shame really, it would be nice to have a need for a mixed fleet in the game. Maybe they should have a fighter bay on large/huge hulls that allow you to take along a certain number of tiny ships with no additional logistics costs.

I use them as cheap orbital defense platforms in the early game, just put weapons on them and nothing else.

Yep.

Hi!

When Korath shows with their armed spore ships, or other AIs with armed troop transports, I usually build some of them in contested areas. Design is simple: just a hull with the cheaperst weapon, nothing else. Otherwise, no use.

BR, Iztok

In Dread Lords, their logistics number was 1. They worked great to take the first few shots of an attacking force. In Dark Avatar, the logistics number was adjusted to 2, so I could not include enough in a fleet to be sufficient cannon fodder. In DA, I only use them as scouts or starbase snipers. They never function as part of a conquest fleet.

Galen

I'm kind of irritated with the way the game handles planetary defense. If one and only one (unless you waste a precious planet space on the relevant "fleeting" improvement) ship can defend per turn, it makes for boring combat:

1. Entire Fleet vs. Single Defender = Defender automatic loss (all else being equal, of course.)
2. But since that fleet has to go one by one, just cluttering up your planets' orbit with empty metal hulks seems a viable, but really really cheesy, defense strategy.

Maybe if Tiny ships automatically made fleets whenever in orbit, there'd be a nice little niche for them.

They've got one fantastic use: military starbases. A fleet of tiny ships with 1 attack, 1 defense (to keep it cheap, use the bulky armour from starship defenses and mass drivers) isn't much on it's own, but since the military starbase bonus applies to each ship individually, the fleet can become absurdly powerful. It gets even better if you stick a more conventional medium hulled ship into the fleet, which will act as a meat shield for the tiny hulls as they do the majority of the damage (so long as the attack value is high enough) This is an excellent way to hold a single sector if you stack a couple starbases, and since the tiny hulls are VERY cheap in the setup I'm talking about, you can mass produce a fantastic military, with the catch being its total immobility... if you want to extend its reach, you need to build another array of starbases.

Other than that... yeah, they're pretty useless! The only real use I can think of is an unarmed scout craft that gets stuck in your fleets to fill out the logistics and give the fleets a better sense of their surroundings.

If they were to be more useful, the logistics values would need messing about with again.

This is a great idea.

Actually I just had a game where tiny actually was helpful:

Very eraly game, with the 1st logistics tech, I could fleet 4 tinies. The korath and Yor were feilding fleets of 2 smalls.

With no engines, my fleets had an attack of 4. The enemy fleets had the same attack.

my 4 tinies cost less than the 2 smalls.

On top of that with 5 hp each, I had 20hp. The smalls with 8 hp each had a total of 16.
I was able win every engagement, with a lose of 1 or 2 ships.

This put me in a great posistion as I cold grind out more tinies faster than they could replace their lost smalls.

However, after the battle, I would have only 2 or 3 tinies left. They lost to a fleet of two smalls. Everytime.

Very niche, I had to build smalls when the korath and yor got the 1st logistics tech, but they really held thier own long enough for me to continue to get my empire running to the point where I could out produce both of them

My current game has changed my mind about tiny hulls. I use to think they were only good for scouting and early planet defense.

However now I have grown to love having a fleet for tiny fighters patrolling sectors of my empire. My current Logistics is only 15 so I can field 7 Tiny fighters equiped with twin mass drivers and the best armor I have. No engines but with the engine tech I have they still move 3 spaces, just enough to patrol around my planets within range of a military starbase.

My favorite fleet/Squadron of Fighters has been alive for 2 years in the game and a few members ar now very skilled. (having 20 HP on a tiny hull because of experience earned makes them scary).

I also found a use for Tiny hulls once my micronization is high enough as cargo ships.
slap a trade module on one and a weapon and you have a freighter with 6 HP and a weapon instead of a cargo hull with 1 hp and no weapons.

Angelon

@ Angelon

If you're only using the tinies in range of a starbase, cheap out on the weapons and armour. A single mass driver and the bulky yet CHEAP armour you get when you research starship defenses will do just fine, as the starbase is what will be giving you the vast majority of your attack and defense anyways.

Also, why use a tiny hull for that purpose? At that point in the game, a large or huge hulled trader would be absolutely brutal for an enemy to attack, since doing so would almost certainly take chunks out of all but the most powerful fleets, and a trader might even survive a few encounters! Its the safest way to set a trade route up, and trade is generally profitable enough in DA to make the cost back within a few turns of the trade route.

i have a question on upgrading freighters. (assuming you name the new freighter designs another name) when you have the new freighters, would you have to re-establish the trade routes?

Tinies are also good for movement wasters - big enemy fleet reaches your economy starbases, and has 3 movement points left - luckily you have 4 or five tinies (not fleeted) parked on all your starbases - big enemy fleet uses its remaining moves killing your tinies - starbase safe for another turn, hopefully enough time for your powerful defensive fleet to catch up!

No they weren't. Maybe early on before any patches, but they've always been 2 as long as I've been playing the game.

Well I was using tiny ships for freighters since I was only up to medium hulls and all of them were being built for main combat against the Yor, Drengin, and Terrans. I still can't figure out what the Terrans were drinking when they became allies of the Drengin.

I just got to large hulls, but all of my allies are gone except for the Iconias and thats because I gave them a planet early on to try to save them so I could milk a bit of trade out of them.

Angelon

tiny ships should get bonuses vs large and huge ships. giving ships a paper/rock/scissors type bonus would make them pretty useful and force you to vary fleets.

smaller ships are always inferior to larger ones. that is pretty cheesy and unrealistic

I could see not having any logistical loss; but to keep it more realistic the carrier holding the tiny ships would have to loose some of it's distance; because the added mass would take more to get it going and to slow it down at the other end.

(Citizen)slygarMarch 27, 2007 17:06:42Reply #9Maybe they should have a fighter bay on large/huge hulls that allow you to take along a certain number of tiny ships with no additional logistics costs.


I could see not having any logistical loss; but to keep it more realistic the carrier holding the tiny ships would have to loose some of it's distance; because the added mass would take more to get it going and to slow it down at the other end.

wow thats a great idea carierrs

That's just getting way too nit-picky for the game. Besides, a fighter bay would be mostly empty space. You'd need a fair amount of room for a tiny ship to take off and land. If it wasn't there, that area would be filled with bulkheads and other facilities. It would probably have more mass than a couple of tiny ships that were parked in a hanger.

Yes, the carrier bay would ignore logistics and the hyperspace speed of the embarked ships. That way you'd have actual 'fighters' that would use the carrier as thier primary means of mobility. I think it's a pretty good method, but it really doesn't matter unless the devs agree too

At the same time you don't really need 'fighters' unless you create a much more involved combat system from what it currently is. That isn't nixing the current combat system, I quite like it. But to really have a use for 'fighters' and 'carriers', you'd need things like manuverability, rate of fire, even ranges for weapons to make fighters and carriers neccessary or relevant. In the current combat system, they simply aren't needed.

My biggest gripe about the combat system is that it is flat: mass drivers are the same as beams are the same as missiles. Missiles don't have a longer range, and beams and drivers don't have a shorter one. This puts combat to math equation of how much more stuff I can fire, and can I fire stuff you can't defend against. This isn't bad, just a bit...flat.

Ok, and as to the actual topic at hand:

I've got a 'tiny' troop ship that mounts a single Adv. Troop module, a 'tiny' constructor, and other such things. I find they make nice, cheap ships for doing stuff that I don't need a full transport with engines or a more expensive constructor with life support, engines, etc. This is especially applicable when I'm building a network of starbases close to my planets. The tiny troopships are great for assaulting neighboring planets--the ones that are only 1 or 2pc away from one of my planets (happens alot with everything set to abundant).

Tinys have thier place for sure. But relegating them to a combat role may be where you're coming up short. Think of other stuff you can do with them, maybe just a fast sensor ship you can fleet with stronger ships so now you've got cheap and disposible sensors without taking up that space on your main combat ships.

Hmm...that's a good idea. I think I might have to try that one myself

I've tried that myself actually. It's an option, but with a tiny hull's natural sensor range being so small, you need to stack a number of sensors on them to be of much use with something like a large hull ship. So they can't really be used for anything else and end up being completely defenceless. The first battle and they're gone.

Actually, they're only defenceless in the sense that they can't add any firepower to the battle. Because of the usual targeting formula, if a sensor boat does accompany a fleet then it would be attacked last. Interestingly, this means they can gain experience without actually doing any fighting....

While it's not ideal to lose two logistics points to gain great sensor coverage, it's better than having an enemy fleet slip by unnoticed.

well, I'm having my first serious game now, where the AIs proove to be a decent challenge (at "tough") and in my first skirmishes with the drengin the tiny ships proved to be a lifesaver.

at first I had a technological edge, while the drengins had massive firepower.
drengins used massdrivers only, I was quite set to beamweapons.
I had a couple of tiny ships (3x2 beam damage, no engines) quite a few small ships (3-4 beam damage, 2x warpdrives) and was just staring to build medium sized ships as the only player and had 2 of them (4 beam damage, durantium armor, 2 warp drives)

at the start my medium sized ships were superior, one of them could single handed destroy a fleet of 3 small drengin ships.

Due the course of war I lost my technological edge without really realizing it.
and I had concentrated solely on the medium ships, which had the disadvantage that I couldn't get 2 of them in a fleet (5 logistic per ship, vs only 9 per fleet)
after some months where I didnt develop my weapons tech massively anymore the drengin fleets of 3 small ships got an advantage over my medium ships and destroyed them easily. and they had many fleets.

I had no means to improve them greatly and quickly and my military output wasn't also that great ( I had only 1 world where I could build them reasonably fast)

in my misery I remembered the tiny ships I had build earlier and wanted to use them as cannonfodder.
but to my surprise the fleets of 4 of those tiny ships destroyed the drengin 3-small-ship-fleets with ease and hardly any damage to themselves.
I had 2 of those 4-tiny-ship fleets and they truly proved to be extremly effective. They basically won the war for me. That gave me the room to use my remaining med-sized ships and troop transports to make a push for the drengin homeworld and conquering it at last+3 others worlds, one of which was the precious economic capital, while the homeworld was the tech capital.

Made peace with the drengin afterwards, since I had no troop ships left and it netted me 2 extra techs and some bc and the drengin will play no role in this game anymore anyway.

so...those 10 odd tiny ships with their (relatively) superior attack abilities were THE deciding factor in this war, which I probably would have lost in the long term otherwise.