4 or 5 hyp shrinkers

*** Drools ***

Wow... I have only had 2. Would love to get my hands on 4 or 5!

Did you give the tech away early to get them to build these for you?

Huh? Huh? Common, answer the question already!

Yes I do. I also give away tech for the hyp resupply. I usually get both from the Iconians and then immediately trade it away. Costs a bit to get if you don't have high diplo but you can get bunches for it in trade.

Tiny hulled ships have one almighty advantage when high end weapons are around.... they dramatically reduce the overall hitpoints an enemy fleet can do. If for example, one enemy ship has firepower of 200 points, your ship has say 8 hitpoints, then all you recieve is 8 hitpoints! This is a serious advantage.

I believe it is fixed in DA though, so yea, that will make small hulled ships pretty obselete.

I usually get both from the Iconians and then immediately trade it away. Costs a bit to get if you don't have high diplo but you can get bunches for it in trade.

There was a "I regret buying this disc" thread today where I said something about this forum being able to help you get deeper into the game. It's been a long while since I learned here about the value of giving or trading away a tech that you want the AIs to start using b/c it could help you.

But until now, I thought Alliances was the only tech to treat that way. Even though I routinely factor special tiles like tech capitals into my choices for invasion, and I love huge long games, I never imagined this unseemly "farming" approach to tech sharing. Fortunately, I'm in a Thalan rut and, like primates, insects have never had a problem turning other species into resources...

insects have never had a problem turning other species into resources...

Only thing I would like to add here G.W., is that sometimes, insects also tend to use their own species as a resource as well.   

Like all of you guys, I never really use any of the tiny hulls. However, I do use small hulls to make "artillery cannons" or defense batteries. What I do is that I just pack them with weapons and nothing else, and station them in orbit around planets and around military starbases. They are also good for making kamikazees when your at the losing end of a war. Miniturization helps make them more effective for those roles. For invasions, I usually use medium to large hulls, but sometimes I'll throw in a "cannon" or two to increase the total amount of firepower.

I never imagined this unseemly "farming" approach to tech sharing.

You can also use this approach to slow down a faction's war machine before you start invading them. For instance, several weeks ahead of your planned assault, trade them an expensive improvement tech like Industrial Centers or Discovery Spheres. They will dutifully start building up your future planets and have fewer credits available to build warships. Cheese? Absolutely, but I know you dislike the term, so I won't call it that.   

I never imagined this unseemly "farming" approach to tech sharing.

If you are going for the military win sharing tech to the AI for your future planets can pay big. I ditto MarshallONeil. You can crush the AI this way.

I do it a bit differently though. Instead of several weeks ahead of invasion, I give it up to several months. Morale, Industry, Economy, Farming, Research is the order of importance in which give it to them. Usually the first few planets invaded have not accomplished much but as you progress more of your social building is already completed for you.

Sounds like an exploit of the Anything Insane. Try that shit with a human and you'd get the colonies so far away from you border upgraded you'd have to fight for hours to get to em but yeah with the AI I can see that working like a charm.

Industry can be particularly crippling. If the AI needs to go up more than one type of Industrial building, it all but shuts down everything else while it is trying to jump multiple levels of upgrade. It does it in some bizarre fashion too. I often see some planets with multiple IC's that look pretty good, while nearby planets haven't even completed a single IC upgrade. I suspect it is buying them outright on a single planet until is upgraded and burning up all it's extra cash doing so (suicidal level). It's nice of it to use it's economic and social bonuses building planets up for me rather than building military ships...

My order would be Industry, Economy, Research, Morale, Farming. I find industry and economy particularly useful to give away...

When you are all but giving away tech to the AI, I have a hard time calling it cheese though. After all, if the AI doesn't manage it as well as a human, is that really your fault?

I give it up to several months. Morale, Industry, Economy, Farming, Research is the order of importance in which give it to them

I would add that to totally cripple them you should try selling them the techs This works even better for you as they build he tech and give you most of their backup credit reserve for the privilege

I use small ships quite a bit. I find Medium hulls to be the most efficient, so my fleets tend to be a mix of Medium attack ships and Small interceptors. I often don't bother building anything larger until the end game when I build a few Huge flagships for the hell of it.

The main advantage of small ships is that they can be built very quickly, so you can design them to counter a specific AI attack, making them very efficient indeed. Managed carefully, they quickly accumulate experience points and soon become as tough as medium hull ships. Large ships can be obselete by the time they're built, especially as the AI is now a lot better at redesigning it's ships.

Originally, I was in favor of the largest hulls, but in my current game I decided to play much more aggressive very early on.

I started invading the closest civilization right after the 1st year was over, and now I am just a bit into the 3rd year and I have pretty much won the game as I am the #1 civilization with 3 times as many planets as the other civilizations. I should be able to crush everyone by the end of this year. (I am playing a gigantic map with all 9 civilizations)

I did it with Tiny, Small, and Medium ships with just a few Large ships. Most of the ships are Medium.

I definitely see the error in my previous opinion. I don't think I will bother to build any Huge ships.

The Medium ships were definitely worth building.

With this new knowledge I would say that Tiny ships aren't very useful, but really Huge ships are equally useless. Medium ships are probably the most useful and cost effective through most of the game.

I do think I wasted BC building the Tiny ships. I should have just skipped those and went with Small ships. But I did manage to effectively use the Tiny ships to harass the enemy trade ships and undefended starbases.

Oddly, I built most of my largest ships after capturing planets that the enemy AI had already invested a ton of BC into production. I was able to finish the Large hulls within 1 turn upon capturing these planets. There were a few times when I would have been able to buld Massive hulls in this way if I had had the tech available.

I believe it is fixed in DA though, so yea, that will make small hulled ships pretty obselete.

In DA you can still get effective use out of tiny and small ships but you have to think about it first. The logistics of the larger ships are getting changed to accomidate the changes.

Personally I've always built "supply fleets" of the small hulls. I have a battle fleet of mixed sizes and the supply fleet of replacements hanging out a turn behind. This allows my battle fleet to engage, take some losses and replace them on the run. Then again, I've played WW2 naval and various fleet games, so I have a tendancy to build balanced fleets.

(Balanced meaning a large core ship or two, medium sized escors and a picket of the small ships. It's easy to manipulate the targetting code so your small ships will be high on the threat level and take the shots first)

I tend to build large and medium(I only have 2 huge ships which I did on purpose) because my enemies tend to build lots of small ships. Small vs. large tends to end in the large victory. My fleets build up huge amounts of exp. because they hardly ever take any damage fighting a few small ships.

-Spencer

We've had a number of these conversations in the past, a couple started by ShuShu (wonder where he is anyway) that have been very interesting. I would say that if anything has been learned, it's never say never. But given that, I still think the most efficient way to deal with a technologically superior opponent is with the swarm. If you're inferior it's harder to match your opponent with the same sized ships and the same sized fleets. It can be done with weapons for which he has no defense and defense for his weapons, it's just much harder

To me its clear that if an enemy is superior to you in weapons technology, as is often the case, it doesn't matter if you can out-class them in productivity.

I've an all-new respect for tiny and small class ships. I made the mistake of sending a Dreadnaught-class vessel after a large fleet comprised of two troop carriers and about 14-16 tiny hull, "snub-nosed fighters" who only had one Stinger apiece. Despite possessing superior PD, they swarmed it and took it down as my jaw dropped.

It was a tactic not lost on me. The next game, I fought the Korx, and despite lagging behind in weapons technology, I used fleets of 8-12 or so fighter class ships, accompanied by 1-2 Frigate, Battleship, or Dreadnaught and cleaned their clocks. My productivity was high enough to keep pumping out the fighters every 7-14 weeks depending on the planet.

The only time I use tiny hulls is when I want a really cheap transport and I have a lot of minis. I also tend to use missiles if I think I will go for larger ships and lasers for small.
I also use tinys and smalls to try and fit the 'right amount' of stuff on.
If 1 missile fits on a tiny and 1 and a half on a small then I will build both. Tinys for defence and smalls for offence.

The main reason I for lager ships is that you need fewer engines and therefor they are cheaper to build even if size mod forces them to take up more room.

The argument for smalls is that when weapons get to 75+ your dead if they hit you so you might as well have a bunch of expendable weapon only ships that are in large groups.
Is miniaturizations better for small ships?

One place where I've found a fantastic use for tinies is with a concentrated starbase defense.

Mass produce the cheapest possible ship that has a tiny hull and both a weapon and armour. This means using the bulky (yet cheap) armour that you get with Starship Defenses, and the best weapon line to go down is mass drivers, given their low cost. These ships can be mass produced at an incredible speed... with 1 attack and 1 defense each. However, with starbase support, especially multiple starbases, those individual fighters become absurdly powerful and can take a lot of abuse. You can increase the abuse they'll take by putting in a medium hulled ship into the fleet with a lot of firepower and at least some defense. That ship will take the vast majority of the punishment while your fighters are raining death.

The only flaw in the strategy is the cost of building those starbases and the fact that you're stuck defending a small area... its a very defensive strategy.

I have found tiny hulls extremely handy. Normally I play in Gigantic Universes. Example a Battle of the Gods.

1] Tiny hull is the first one I build on any given planet. Why?

Yep, small ships + military starbase is a nice combo, and it's how I win wars where I'm outnumbered & outgunned. Large ships are fine and wonderful when I'm winning the war, but it's the wars I'm losing that really count. Also you can put a starbase on the enemy's turf, so it doesn't HAVE to be entirely defensive. You can slap down a military starbase so it enshrouds the other guy's planets, and use that to take out the orbiters. Then when you invade his planets, you have a military starbase defending your NEW planets. It's defensive, but look what you're defending....

Military starbases can get expensive when you're not evil, though. You can't just spam them. You're talking ~4 constructors, which costs about the same as ~2 medium-hulled ships, plus ~800bc up-front cost. But you recoup the cost in terms of ships you would have built and died. Kind of like renting vs. buying a house--buying is more expensive in the beginning, but in the end you're left with a house. Renting may be easier, but your $$$ just go down the drain w/ nothing to show for it.

sorry hit the wrong button.

I have found tiny hulls extremely handy. Normally I play in Gigantic Universes. Example a Battle of the Gods.

1] Tiny hull is the first one I build on any given planet. Why?
a] quick build that elimates cheap shot invasions.
b] Two Hyper Warp Mrk III and one Hyper warp mark II and Ultra support with two doom weapon mass drivers gives good speed and a 32 hp punch.
c} this is the only class I have found where the mass weapon can out class in damage a missle or beam weapon.

2] In swarms they can be nasty and I have taken out fleets with small through Huge hulls with a swarm of tinys (although not many left). All in all they exchange was on my side with a relpacement time for a tiny of at the max 10 weeks for a Huge hull maximum 25 weeks plus on a lov average Industrial planet. On Highly industrial plants 1 a week.

3} excellent attrition units. I would prefer a little fighter blown up than one of my medium cruiser hulls.

4] perfect for taking out "fleets" of troop ships (espically if un armed).

5] its a great way to get a mix of weapon types to battle to explote weakness in an oppontes defenses.

6} I do not like seeing my dreadnaughts go boom.

7) I have seen by the end of the game a single tiny fighter with 52 hit points (I actually named a fighter in that game Chuck Yeager). I have seen a number of low 40hp to 30hp too.

8) seening battle cruisers go boom sucks only marginally less than dreadnaughts.

9) tiny hulls are cheap in money and time to build and make very pretty colors when they do go boom.

As you can tell I spend more on speed than fire power. With they game mechanics only firing all weapons of one ship at another instead of split firing with something like a Starfleet Battles Ageis system its makes more sense. And in keeping with Quantrill, Mosbey and Morgan my troop ships have a speed of 43 "who ever gets there the first with the most troops wins". Its sorta fun to see a fleet from the enemy fighting at my borders and they next turn they have no home planet to go home too.

Well if you dont like tinies you dont like tinies and thats cool. I would like to hear your plans on feiling 43 Logistic point fleet.

John W.

In DA, tiny and small hulled ships are of even more dubious value:


* They can rarely ever be fitted with more than one engine and still have weapons, and therefore be speedy as someone above suggested, because of engine sizemod/speed nerf. At least, not untill youre nearly maxed technologically, by which time, it would be foolish to throw that much costly technology on a small hull which is not going to survive any real military encounter, and not neccesary to kill 1 HP troop/spore ships, and defenseless starbases.


* They dont have enough HP to survive battles, or hullpoints to stock significant defenses, and therefore gain HP through experience.


* Massed fleets of small ships are no longer effective in DA, except against other fleets of small ships. A larger hulled ship will tear though entire fleets of small vessels in the new combat system. The best you can hope for is to sacrifice an entire fleet of smaller ships to take out a medium or large ship. ( This makes me wonder though if small ships might be useful with the Arcean First strike ability where the larger ships dont get to shoot back).


* Youll inevetiably have a few dedicated planets doing your warship production by mid game. Youll find that from one of these planets, a medium ship costs maybe one or two turns more of production than a small hull, and a large hull 2 turns more than a medium hull. Under that kind of cost/efffectiveness math, its hard to justify the creation of a small ship except in the most extreme situations when those one or two turns really will make a difference. Especially since small ships will rarely ever survive combat, even against warships with half their attack damage.


The only three (non-emergency) reasons to ever build small/tiny warships remain:

1) You cant build larger ships yet.

2) As an inexpensive token defender against spore and troop ships for a planet that will probably never see any real threat.

3) As a novelty for personal satisfaction, while you wish that the game had clearly defined and compelling reasons to build small tiny hulled attack ships, maybe for use on ...(whispers conspiratorily)...a carrier. But wishing dont make it so.


As for the above assertion that "no one hull is better than another", thats absurd. Otherwise we'd get all the hull types at once without having to research them at considerable effort. The larger hulls are clearly meant to be better in GC. This may not be true for "science fiction" in general, but it is for the game.

We're still missing reason #4: because small ships stack well with military starbases. 3 small ships get 3X the starbase bonus than one large ship.

No, I omitted that one on the basis that military starbases and starbase defenses tech research are complete wastes of time that no experienced player bothers with anyways. See any one the the 20 other threads on that (seperate, but relevant) issue.