Tiny/Small ships?

Only reason I ever build smalls is to boost my military rating early, or if I get into a very early war. Anything smaller than a medium is pretty useless to me, since I don't care for leaving stuff in orbit and they don't really have room for an engine.

When I first start out I will build maybe 1 or 2 tiny ships per planet (and if possible park 1 on a resource and stick a cheap weapon (usually laser) on each (no defense) just to deter any would-be bullies from getting any ideas.

This I think also helps your military ranking even if only slightly so (correct me if I'm wrong here).
After that I just leave them and pretty much forget about them until I research med. hulls and better weapon tech.

I learned the hard way by trying to go strictly "influence" or "technological" victory, forgetting my military and thereby getting "beaten up" early to mid game because of this oversight and then trying to scramble to correct the damage (almost too late at that point).

But yes, as a rule now I build a few tiny ships very early just to get some respect from the other AI's.

I always get into early wars, so I use small ships a lot. Also, Tiny ships stack very nicely together with military starbases. Another use is for scouting if you have the Eyes.

The big quality I like about Tiny ships: they're only 80bc. That means even your mickey-mouse planets can make them on their spare time. They can supplement your 400bc-and-up dreadnaughts you're making on your manufacturing powerhouse planets.

my smalls actually stand pretty good in war maybe because i only put one gun on them and then the rest is defense.

They are the cheapest way to show some military presence, and thereby help deter the galactic bullies from every starting in on you.

I played my entire last game never building anything but Defenders (and my subsequent upgrades). I just kept them all upgraded to the latest tech, and added a few more to the system protection fleets whenever I had spare cash, or sometimes when I thought the opponents might be sizing me up.

Then in the final war (that was triggered by the assassination event - see, the deterrance was still working up til then), my fat little Final Defenders (plus a few supporting Lucky Rangers) cleaned up. In case you've ever wondered, when you have max log, you can put 16 Smalls in a fleet...and mine each had 5 disruptors and double layers of all ultimate defenses. Don't bother with the math - the fleet was firing beam x 560 volleys - usually once per battle. They were slow getting to the enemy system, but when they got there, they stayed.

Plus they LOOKED really great, swarming all over those dreadnaughts and battleships!

drrider

I think Small Hulls should only be used to fill in logistics gaps that bigger hulls leave behind, relegating them to usage as 'escorts'.

Otherwise, Medium Hulls are the most effective early on, and then you get Large and Huge hulls later which are even better, but in most cases(IMO), uglier .

As for Tiny Hulls, you can bolt on one defense and one weapon and anything else in the remaining space, and fleet together as many of them as possible. Then you put up an array of four military starbases in a certain sector, and upgrade them to make them as powerful as your tech allows. That way, the SBs give the same bonus to each of those tiny-hulls in the swarm fleets to make a rather powerful early to mid-game interception force.

It doesn't take much research effort to tech up to Starbase Conquest Strategy, and the tiny swarms are effective until huge hulls come along late in the game and swat them aside. However, the sheer number of constructors required to set up such an array and the sheer inflexibility of the plan makes it impractically expensive.

Such a system can also be used to immobilize passing enemy ships by surrounding them with tiny ships and using Interdictor Beams on them, or it can be used to propel offensive fleets of larger ships by using Stellar Wakes and Inverse Tractor Beams on them, but IMO, it's not worth the price.

I'd only use a couple of Star Furies very early in the game to try and trick anyone into thinking I'll go down laser road, and to have a symbolic 'military' while I research he techs required to build my true military designs.
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EDIT: Well if you have 7 inherent logistics and have completed any one branch of weaponry, you can have fleets of 29 tiny 1/1 attack/defense cheap ships boosted by 4 military starbases to a total:

Attack: 153 per ship. 153 x 29 = 4437 attack per fleet!!! Without any further bonuses!
Defense: 29 per ship(vs each attack type). 29 x 29 = 841 defense per fleet.
Speed: 8pc/wk speed boost to all of your ships.
Enemy Speed: All enemy ships slowed down by 4pc/wk.
Cost: 44 bc per ship = 1276 bc per fleet.(Using a Railgun & Armor Plating on 27-size hulls)
HP: 5 x 29 = 145 hp per fleet.

These tiny fighter swarms will be able to kill fleets of all-attack huge hulls even late in the game. Combine it with First Strike and maybe a 25% or 50% Luck bonus and no one will be entering that sector easily. However, I don't think it's very useful/feasible outside of an abundant galaxy where each sector is dense and you have plenty of planets to fund this thing.

And 29 tiny fighters will look great using First Strike and swarming over 5 hapless dreadnoughts, who thought they were the biggest offensive meanies in the galaxy, and are gone before they could wonder what hit them.

Further Edit: If you max out the tech tree, attach 6 more modules to each military SB, and fit 3 Black Hole Eruptors + 1 Black Hole Generator to each tiny fighter, you'll get 299 attack per fighter and a fleet attack of... 8671!!! Effective in killing even highly defensive dreadnought fleets(with a luck bonus). But then, each tiny fighter would cost 605 bc!
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What huge-hull 'dreadnought' do you get for 400 bc? The huge hull itself costs 320 bc. Or are you calling all Medium/Large/Huge hulls 'dreadnoughts'?

I tend to build a few small ships early on when I notice about 2/3 of the AI is building up some military capacity, to avoid getting bullied.
Especially when I'm focusing a lot on research, weapon upgrades will keep these small ships competitive throughout part of the mid-game. By the time they're entirely obsolete, I've usually researched at least large hulls.

To the point of the 400-bc-and-up-dreadnaughts: even my medium custom designs will cost some 500 - 800 bc, and for a large ones I'll typically pay over 1000. Annoying to see sometimes that the AI seems to be flying cheaper ships than mine, while they pack almost the same punch, though they have less HP and are slower.

I've never found a good use for tiny hulls but I use small hulls as my basic fighting unit in every game. I find that a small hull with a pair of psionic beams and 3 or 4 engines depending on my engine tech and miniaturization level can destroy fleets of dreadnoughts as long as my logistics is high enough. I can take out fleets of huge hull ships mounting decent beam defense and BHE's with enough of these. They're cheap and quick to build and that's good because you can run through a lot of them.

Get your logistics up near 60 and put 19 or 20 of these in a fleet and it wipes out pretty much anything. You take a lot of losses so you need to have lots of replacements but for DL games nothing can beat this combination. I assume that for DA this may not work at all given that each weapon can fire at separate targets, but in DL anyway this strategy rocks.

Never tiny, but I guess I use a few smalls. In my last Huge game I only had about 4000 of them . That was DL V1.5

When I don't want to look like the game chump to the other AIs I will often build a handful of smalls with weapons only towards the start of the game.

Hi!

Recently I use those hulls as a frame for constructor modules for upgrading close econ starbases. But for warships I don't use them at all.

BR, Iztok

For DL, true. For DA, it's a different story.



Yup. My Medium Hull designs cost 300-1200 bc depending on how far up the tech tree they are. But I wouldn't call Medium Hulls 'Dreadnoughts'.

Actually, I wouldn't call ANY ship Dreadnought except for the early 1900s British battleships. Huge hulls would be Capital Ships.

Oh. Tiny's. I build hundreds of my Builder_Lite design every game.

I use a Small frame Builder (or Builder-x or Builder-xx, as the range goes up) to pioneer (hmm...may have to change ship class to that name) distant resources and other SB loactions. Once there is a barebones SB established, you can send a minimum range tiny constructor to the SB even if there are intervening areas that are nominally out-of-range of the tiny ship. And a minimal Builder_Lite is only about 3/4 to 2/3 the cost of a Small-frame Builder series.

Unless you are Yor, however, you need 2 steps of Miniturization tech before you can cram a constructor module under a tiny tug.

drrider

As many have said mainly early to show some force smalls are the way to go.

The problem I've had skipping to mediums is it tends to take too long to get them going, and even if you do, you don't tend to have the concentrations of them you need. (or they're not in the right places)

The nice things about the smalls is its easy to use them later in the game as your standard defenders. (fleet them up at your starbases, set one to gaurd key areas, and leave them on forward planets to stop invasion)

Otherwise I try to get to large hulls for the bulk of the game with enough defense to make them neigh invincible.

Wouldn't the lack of space be uncomfortable for a constructor crew on long voyages?

Given that the actual construction is done by nanites, I imagine that most of these long haul materials deliveries are done by just a couple of driving partners, husband and wife teams, or the occasional heroic lone trucker overdosing on coffee, 'bennies', and country music.   

Plenty of room in the cab over model.

drrider

Evil, phisoinc wepons, tiny/small hulls. Deadly

Small hulled ships are fun! They make great kamikazes that are cheap. Get a few levels of mini, slap an ion engine or a warp engine on that puppy and blow stuff up.

On a side note, I did play the Yor once and made ONLY tiny hulled ships. It was a lot of fun, swarming enemies with a load of little bugs. Occasionally you get the 3 or 4 fighters that would live through some battles and get a lot of exp and they turned into super fighters   

In the masochistic large game I am currently playing I use tiny ships exclusively. I made the mistake of going "factories only" strategy on a map with too few habitable worlds. Consequently, I am hopelessly behind in tech. However, my tiny low tech level fleets (13 ships, base attack 8, no defense, no engine) can beat escorted dreadnoughts without losing a single ship! How? I have the first strike ability and 2-3 overlapping military starbases, which give each ship additional +6 attack. Often enemy fleets do not survive the first volley and when they do I seldom lose more than two tiny fighters. AI does not seem to grasp the danger of the first strike and stubbornly keeps sending fleets for slaughter. So all I have to do is to build constructors when I wish to claim new territory. Since I chose all factories strategy it is not difficult at all to build hordes of constructors.

Their invaluable in DL against high end weapons. An enemy ship with an attack value of 200! so what, they only get whatever the hitpoints of your tiny hulled ship is.