Why Build Small Ships?

I think I agree. Most of the time, small ships aren't worth it compared to large. Unless you are going up against an opponent with huge offence and no defence (e.g. Dreadlords), you seem to get a lot more bang for your buck out of large ships.

The only thing I can come up with is if you had a fleet of tiny ships in range of a military starbase with ship assist bonuses it could *potentially* be more powerful than one large ship. This works because the bonuses get applied to each SHIP in range of the starbase and the large ship only gets the bonus once whereas the fleet of 5 or 6 small ships would get the bonus 5 or 6 times. So the large ship maybe a 12/10 (arbitrary offense/defense numbers for demonstration purposes) and you might have +3/+3 offense/defense on your starbase. The large ship would become 15/13 while in range of the starbase while your small ships that may be 2/1 each (making a fleet of 5 ships 10/5) then become 25/20. The potential downfall to this is that the small ships would lose a ship or two each time they fought due to less hps and you would need to replace a few ships after each fight.

Tiny ships are cheaper to produce. I use them far, far more than larger hulls.

Generally, I'll only even use smalls if I go evil and need that space to fit Psy weapons (which are massive) on a ship. Otherwise I use tinies almost exclusively until I get Huge hulls, at which point I build Juggernoughts to escort them.

Of course, I play as Yor, so the inherent 25% miniturisation bonus makes smaller hulls considerably more useful right off the bat.

Like someone said, Tiny ships are cheap to produce and are a great way to create a fleet of early defensive ships for your planets. If you are going for anything other than a military victory, these make it a fast way to defend your planets as well as raise your military value a little.

Tiny ships = 2 fleet points, Medium hulls = 4 fleet points, large 5, huge 6.

What does this mean?
For a fleet of 3 Huge, you can have 9 tinies. 3 tinies cost less than one huge if you equip them with comparable-level technologies, The tinies have less hit points individually but they fire 3 times for each time the huge does. Also, since they are tinies, if they go after a huge and win, they're likely to go up levels very fast - you can then mix and match your veterans into uber-powerful "Death squadron" fleets with massive amount of HPs (for tinies at least)

Just my opinion...

Yes, big is good and powerful but you can fleet up more smalls and they fire more often in total and if you add it up, they cost less to maintain.

so it's give and take.

I think the advantage of the small ships is that you can produce them really fast. That way you can have two or three ship producing powerhouses (more powerplanets actually) and spam your enemy in some sort of kamikaze attacks. If you build some fast all attacking fleets of small ships equipped with weapons for which your enemy doesn't have defenses you could take his ships down without any loses or with small ones while you are pumping more ships through the producing line. That would allow you to react quickly to an oponent you were not expecting (let's say all your fleet is equipped with phasers but the drengin have good defences against beam weapons, then you shift to missile weapons and can build your attacking force much quickly than if you'd build larger ships).
The price of the hulls is indeed negligable, but a large ship will take a lot more time to build because all those weapons, sensors, etc. cost a lot of bc.
Of course speed and logistics are very important here.

A huge fleet of small hulled ships with a high miniaturisation bonus can pack an extremely deadly punch. They each get to roll against the defender. They also cost significantly less to maintain.... and as Draknost said, within range of a fully upgraded Starbase they are equal in all areas to larger hulled ships except in HP. If you can churn out 5 of them in the time it takes to build one behemoth.... sometimes the sheer force of numbers can change the tide of battle. I have a Terran ship I use specifically for this purpose... the Justice Class - very mean in the late game!!


EDIT: Either I typed that really slowly or I had a time warp happen.... I replied after Draknost.... then there were 4 replies in between!!

I'm no tactical/strategic whiz but here's my two cents:

There are several factors that you must keep in mind when considering the advantages of all hull types. Tiny and Small hulls may initially seem superfluous but they most definately have their advantages. It all depends on your combat and design philosophies.

Firstly, logistics is the most important factor in determining how many ships you can put together to form a fleet; the hull size is commensurate with the logistics cost. You can fit in more Tiny ships in a single fleet group than you can with Medium ships. Since your logistics is going to be quite low in the begining stages of your game, this will have an impact on your projection of power.

Secondly, there's the financial consideration. Small and Tiny ships don't take as much time to build and are far cheaper to maintain than Medium ships. This means that you can build up a fleet presence quickly and project that power with faster reaction times.

Then there's the quantity versus quality arguement. Building a powerful ship-of-the-line is a valid strategy and has the potential to increase your chances of winning a battle. But it is also a very expensive investment and losing one, like it or not, will have an impact on your economy and overall strategy in some form or another. Or if you're lucky and it survives but is heavily damaged, it'll be out of commission for a little bit while it's docked for repairs. That's a piece of hardware that isn't being utilized and is a further drain on your economy. Maybe you want to group up your Medium ships into a fleet. Still...that gets expensive in the initial states of the game. Or you could build a bunch of little flying guns on the cheap and very quickly. You can group more of them into a fleet and you can overwhelm the enemy with superior numbers. You'll lose a few and that fleet's combat capabilities would have been decreased...but you still have a military presence, diminished as it may be.

Now you might say to yourself, "But I can have HUGE Hulls now. And they will seriously rock the pwn." True. They will. But by that time, Tiny and Small hulls would have been made more flexible because if you would've followed up on your miniaturization technologies, your Tiny and Small hulls will have as many as or more available hardpoints as your medium hulls at the very begining of the game. So again, you can have a Huge warship and it'll stand toe-to-toe with whatever the enemy has and brawl it out, but then there's still the consideration of time and resources invested into building that thing as well as the maintenence to keep it running.

To use a weird analogy, the Germans had superior tanks back in World War II. They were the pinnacle of combat technology back then and when going one-on-one against an American tank, the German tank would win every time. What made the difference for the American army was that although their tanks were inferior, they were cheaper to build and could be mass-produced. So despite all the technological sophistication and sheer combat power of the German tanks, the Americans were able to win through strength in raw numbers. It's something you might want to consider.

I think the starbases point is a good one. Smaller ships stand to gain more in proportion.

I don't see the point about cost, though. Small ships are surprisingly expensive for their utility. A fully-outfitted small is going to cost about half as much as a huge, and I don't think two small ships are the equal of a huge in most situations. It's not hard to build a huge in 2 or 3 turns on a world that's geared for it. Though it is true that smaller craft are easier to produce in a timely fashion on more worlds.

I can definitely see that there is an effective play style that works with smaller ships. The flexibility of production, and being able to be in more places at once, is a good thing for sure. Overall though, I think on an equal-cost or equal-logistics basis, I think a fleet of Huge ships is significantly more powerful than a fleet of Small or Tiny ships.

So despite all the technological sophistication and sheer combat power of the German tanks, the Americans were able to win through strength in raw numbers. It's something you might want to consider.

I think if they had swapped designs, the Allies would still have won handily. Let's not forget the huge difference in manufacturing capability. Also, the later Panther and Tiger tanks had a lot of problems. From an engineering standpoint, I think the Russian tanks were better than both.

The Tiger tanks were problems to begin with, it would take something like a month to build one. In comparison, it took 1-2 days to build an entire Sherman. The Russian T-33/34s were superior to anything on the battlefield due to their design and simplicity (sloped armour and very easy to manafacture) till the Panther came out. The Panther was the German response to the T-34s. The Panthers were of better design (the later versions anyway), but equipment shortages screwed them over (plus, it was too little too late).

small ships are easier to mass produce and um if you have to make ships at less than favorable places (ie worlds that arent all factories... ) these worlds can keep up and bolster the fleets. Yeah expect to take losses but its quantity that matters if you are using this strategy anyhoo.

The tinies have less hit points individually but they fire 3 times for each time the huge does.

If you are firing on an enemy that has defenses each attack must first overcome those defenses before causing damage. So let's say that you have 3 tiny ships with attack 8 against effective defense 8 vs. 1 huge ship with attack 24 against effective defense 8. Not only will the huge ship's attack perform better against the defense, its' attack will not be deminished until it loses all its' hit points. When the tiny fleet loses 1/3 of its' hit points, 1 tiny ship will be destroyed and 1/3 of its' attack strength is lost. When the tiny fleet loses 2/3 of its' hit points, 2 tiny ships will be destroyed and 2/3 of its' attack strength is lost.

I would say the biggest advantage to building the smaller ships is, as someone already mentioned, the ability to overwhelm the opponent.
Maintenance costs aside, if you have enough planets, it's a lot easier to pump out ship after ship if they're small.
Especially if you're behind in military techs, I'd say this is the best way to hold off a more advanced enemy--build military starbases if you can, and throw wave after wave of small ships from your front-line planets at him, until you're able to produce equally advanced large ships from one of your protected planets.

If you're way ahead economically, militarily, and technologically, then I'd agree that small and tiny ships are probably useless for you. And I personally would like to see the costs between the different hull sizes tweaked in order to make the smaller ships even more useful later in the game.
having said that, though, in the games I've played on medium sized galaxies and smaller, I have only built a handful of large ships, and have never built a huge ship. But then I also tend to play defensively rather than offensively--it's easier to patrol and defend a large front with lots of smaller ships than it is with only a few big ships.

Don't forget that you can build up the hitpoints of smaller ships from the beginning, so by the time you do get medium/large hulls, those small ships arent so er... small anymore.

Large ships I produce in my star planets with the mega-factories. Tiny ships I produce at the not-so-mega planets. I have to admit, though, as technology progresses I use much less of the tiny hulls.

Symbiance hit upon a crucial point that has largely been ignored: many small ships are more flexible to deploy than a few large ships. They can be spread in a cordon defense, grouped into large strike forces, and switch quickly between those two extremes.

If I'm approximately equal to my enemy, large fleets of tiny ships can have incredible first-strike capability: I've assembled fleets of 17 ships, each armed with Psyonic Beams, that could wipe out battleships before they could respond.

If I'm behind in the tech or economy race, tiny ships can employ a guerilla strategy: assembling into fleets to attack escorted transports, but scattering to attack undefended starbases or freighters. If the enemy tries to crush my fleets, I disperse: his cruisers and battleships can't chase more than a small fraction of my force if I fly to all points of the compass.

The key for small-craft strategy is speed. Don't be tempted to skimp on engines to pack more combat capability into your miniscule hulls: a fleet of tiny ships that can outpace a more-powerful enemy is far more precious than three fleets that can be hunted down and exterminated.

This thread has given me many interesting ideas. Thanks.

I think the problem with small ships is that you can only produce one ship per turn per planet no matter how small the ship.

Problem two is that you can only have a maximum of eight ships in orbit, and if you build a Spin Control Center (or whatever it's called) and park eight of your biggest ships there, you will appear so powerful that no enemy will ever attack you.

My strategy - small ships (and second line... those which survive the previous war) stay back in my territory to defend or crawl along behind the larger ships (ships of the line) to hold territory that they've taken out the opposing fleets. Once the major enemy opposition is out of the way the front line ships advance to the next area and all the smaller/weaker ones hang back until I can get transports up to take out the planets.

It works fairly well... and since I keep the technological advantage I'm able to wipe out other races with 100+ military ratings... when I have a rating of 0. (I go for quality over quantity)

and since I keep the technological advantage I'm able to wipe out other races with 100+ military ratings... when I have a rating of 0. (I go for quality over quantity)

Very powerful.