It depends on which version of the game your talking about. In Dread Lords hordes of small ships are quite effective against large ships, but due to changes in the combat system in Dark Avatar they are not as useful and can get cut to pieces against a capitol ship or two.

In my experience, smalls in fleets at your current log max will fare better than tinies. Smalls will have enough room to give them a modicum of defense, and at least one of your biggest weapon. I believe that squadrons of them may have a bigger deterrent effect on AI judgements to declare war on you as well.

You will need to keep your gunboats at a comparable tech to your enemies, or better. Gunboats are also small enough that you can run an incremental upgrade program on the hulls you already have instead of scrapping them, without breaking the bank.

drrider

It comes down to your style of play i think. It is nothing for me to have a game last 10 years. Now that game would be a gigantic, abundant all, military victory with 9 opponents and as goes with those settings, one can have many hundreds of planets and many thousands of ships. My game style is a slow and methodical one. I don't tend to go to war very early and will try and take out each race 1 at a time.

I know players that with those settings can finish that same game and on a much harder level in 5,6 or 7 years.

I guess being more aggressive would speed your game up quite a bit, but on the flip side are you prepared for that. One can be at war the whole game when one is aggressive and the micro management required to still build your empire whilst wiping out other civs is terribly high....



As DA mentioned in DL the small and tiny fighters were usefull. In DA, it is nothing to encounter a enemy fleet of 14 ships and take them out with 1 huge hulled capital ship, losing maybe a few hit points, but no real damage.

It's related to your intelligence. You planted spies on other races, and when you get to a certain level of intelligence on their civ (low? maybe medium?) you can determine what each fleet's orders are. If you select the ships of a civ you haven't spied on, you won't see ship destinations.

There's lots of stuff you don't *have* to do in the game that can be time consuming and can make your games run a lot longer. For example, you don't *have* to set up trade routes. You don't *have* to build any starbases (except resource ones). You don't *have* to build defenses around all your planets. You don't *have* to research more than one line of weapons tech. What you can get away with does depend on how many habitables you're playing with, but there's lots of other stuff as well. Regardless of your win goal, keeping your military rating higher than the other races is key. The higher the better.

Also, there are some tricks to speed up those things you have to do. For instance, instead of building a full colonizer for every planet, just plop a starport on an adjacent one and pop out a small or tiny hull with nothing but a colonizer module on it. A similar thing can be done when updgrading resource starbases.

Some things are just fun to do even though they are time consuming. For instance, it's really fun to fully research two lines of weapons tech then switch guns after the AI has put all their effort into defending against your first weapon. But, that takes a number of turns.

Personally, I can get a gig/abun DA game down to 6 years by doing the absolute minumum I need to win. I can get a gig/abun DL game down to 4. But, that's not necessarily the most fun game. Some of the most enjoyable DA games I've had were more in the 8 year range, 6 for DL. I wouldn't be overly concerned that 8 years is too much time to spend on a large map, but if you want to shorten your games, hopefully you found my comments helpful.