lesson learned or user error?

I'm no master but from what I've read small hulls aren't all that effective...

Small hulls make for okay deterrence. You can produce them fast to inflate your military score and thus discourage war.

Your reply brings up an interesting question: Which things inflate your military score most effectively? I've read here that someone builds a few warships with cargo hulls just to look menacing and build up their military score...I can see where even one or two ships with high offense and defense points could create the impression you have advanced warships stronger than anybody else. On the other hand, some say build a lot of the smallest possible warships, this can be done quickly and cheaply. So...which raises your military score more...the number of warships you have? Or the strongest warship you have? Anybody know the answer to this one? Thanks.

As previously said, small hulls are pretty much cannon fodder. In DL, they were effective and probably somewhat cheesy since every ship only got a single shot at an opponent. (So if your 12 small hulls can wipe out his 3 massive hulls in a single turn, you can only lose 3 ships at the most)

With DA, each ship can kill as many ships as it has weapons. Which generally means those 3 massive hulls will win.

Once you add in some defense, the balance goes heavily to larger hulls. The AI doesn't understand this though. Which makes larger hulls really potent against the AIs.

I can't say which is best. I use small hulls when the AI builds up their empires so I can rapidly overcome their military strength, and this is largely because I have better weapons and maybe defenses than they do. I don't build cargo hulls for this, so I can't say how well that works in comparison.

When the AI's building large and huge ships, I build medium. At some point, I sell off my old cheap stuff to whichever empire is in really bad shape and at war with someone.

For long term use during war, small hulls are rather discouraging. However, as I have noticed in ToA, for short wars during the early portions of the game (first 3 years I suppose)they will do alright. However, generally, my suggestion is pretty much gallagher's: large hulls are very effectivedue to the amount of weapons and armor they can carry. This means they can combat that many more forces at once. However, your defeat my also be attributable to your lack of military technology

Artificial boost to military ratings?
One word - Omega.
And a whole paragraph about an alternate situation;

The greatest planet gamble; By using an expandable outpost (more like PQ14+, freshly colonized or relatively undevelopped BUT well located near the highly rated race against which you wish to engage.), you'd draw enemy fleets into a trap.
They bite.
Now, that place is heavily guarded (local starport, mostly factories, rapid production for the single-turn repetitive minimal defender ship with high ratios, maybe heavy shields and more) and resupplied as often as necessary.
Enemy fleets after another lost means the compounded strength is eroding progressively while yours is effectively taking low damages AWAY from the final hit group in idle nearby.
By monitoring the gap between your ratings, you can actually charge out at the right moment to destroy the last invading squads -- at reasonable cost to your economy.
Sure you'd possibly get to lose the BIGGY planet... but the AI spent most of its rating for this one only.

Although, behind the curtains, you were preparing a high-tech transport to retake it.
Conclusion? About 10(+/-) of your ships for a proportional 100/200+ of theirs! That's 1 to 10, buddy. And, all of that is traveling money when a fair share of yours is still on standby.

Mind you, that tactic worked only once. I have yet to encounter another situation which would warrant a similar strategy. Knowing i can use it -whenever- is good enough for me though.

- Zyxpsilon.

its too bad if small hulls are destined to be ineffective long term. I can see the desire to make larger hulls better as you have to research them. I also see the removal of freedom in how a person perceives his/her empire. It seems counter-intuitive to the player design aspect of the game. On the one end there are efforts made to permit players to define their own ships/race/etc. in order to help them immerse themselves in the game. On the other hand if the vision of your race's military is a deadly swarm of space-faring machines you're left out in the cold.

I wonder if it would have been better (or possible) to permit all hulls from the get go. The path to creating a fleet of larger hulls would lie in the tech advances you make in industry. This would naturally lend itself to building smaller ships first with the option to create larger ones (in an acceptable amount of time at least) as your production permitted. I suppose now you are capable of making the decision to pursue larger hulls or miniaturization.

I suppose you could debate that a larger vessel has more space so can house enough defense to nullify a small ship.

Then again you could argue that the smaller vessel requires a smaller defense field and should be able to demonstrate the same defense-intensity.

its all gone convoluted in my head now.

Oh, another way to boost your [perceived] military strength is to build a spin control center.

It makes things sooo much easier.

Or both the SCC and the Omega, inside your military starbase array. Which just happens to have hundreds of tiny/small hulls with minimal armor/weapons. Low upkeep, but since there's hundreds of the little suckers, they get an insane boost. They can't DO anything, but all the AI knows is that they look impressive as hell on paper.

Hi!

Mil score: sum of all actuall attack from all your ships + sum off all acutall defense + sum of all hitpoints / 10.

Ships in orbit get an attack bonus, that seems to be rounded up, so a fake defender (cargo hull with cheapest attack-1 gun, beam and missile) gets an attack value of 6 when in orbit, artificially doubling your mil score. Besides building and upgrading mil starbases is this the cheapest way to increase it, and the most affordable one in the early game.

BR,