Got me! I would love to be able to use em as anti colonization ships but that doesnt seem to be what devs want (Possible cause its ahrd to program AI to counter that) so they make the weapons too big to use on the ships in the beggining. I mean I need a weapon and speed so I can take out those friggin colony ships landing in my own frikkin home system! MY HOME SYSTEM FOR GODS SAKE! That's just strategically retarded to let that happen but it does cause you cant have military ships to guard agianst that crap and a colony ship is more use enroute to a pq17 than the pq3 thats right next to your homeworld.

I rather have the pq17 actually. Especially on small map.

Bah, avoid them and jack up the research monies as well as your research to about 80% spending and 50% research with 25% social and military.

"Size does matter!"

One thing I have not seen mentioned here is that a ship can only target 1 other ship at a time.
I was facing Yor fleets with every (medium) ship having 40-60+ beam attack, even the troop transports! This means that every one of these ships pretty much killed any of my ships in one shot in battle, regardless of the size (no Dreadnaughts yet). This 'defensive' tactic worked really well because I was honesly scared of going up agains these fleets.

Then I started using tiny ships with 24 attack to withdraw the firepower from my big ships. This meant that every shot from the enemy could still kill one of my ships but since they were only tiny ships I had a lot more of them to spare. They sort of operate like one-shot-kamikaze-missiles.

It is important for this tactic that the small ships represent a serious enough threat for the AI to target them (more attack/hp than the big ones) otherwise they become pointless.

In the meantime my big ships could mount enough defenses to deal with other races that were using more reasonable attack/defense ratios.

I love the fact that the AI came up with a good tactic to make me scared of their fleets, no amount of defense would have been able to deter me, but this massive amount of attack definately has cost me a lot (of time and money).

heh, nice one Nullspace

Don't know if this has been sugested already, but how about making them a requirement for the ground assault's air superiority bonus? The bonus would only apply if the attacker has tiny hulls (fighters) in orbit, and the size of the bonus would depend on the # of tiny hulls, up to the current max.