Tiny Ships

Tons. Once you get the second level of miniaturization, they are the cheapest hull you can put constructor, colony, mining, trade, and transport modules on, making them ideal for such throw-away ships as long as speed isn't necessary. Beyond that, they get thrown under military starbase arrays to multiply their military score to a ridiculous factor (yes, I know huge hulls are technically better, but bleh - I start building fodder before I get huge hulls).

You can also use them for planet defenders.

Load them up with weapons - no defense or engines or anything else.

You can make a couple larger ships for more firepower, but the tiny ships will cost the attacking ship a speed point if nothing else.

Hmm, I'll have to think about this, but I like my constructers, colony ships and transports to be fast.

I don't build military starbases anymore. I don't like fighting defensive wars.

I prefer to take it to the enemy. Which tiny ships are ill suited...

I don't like orbital defensive ships either. Well placed 'fast' fleets, I feel, are a much

more effective counter force.

And it takes nearly as much time to build a tiny ship as a medium one. Insane.

It would be cool if you could use them like fighters. With a zero Logistics value and able to

place them on larger ships, like a Carrier. Then I would build the hell out of them.

Not when they're full up.

Eh, their real purpose these days is scoremongering.

With regards to tiny ships, they are at some point(s) the only way to beat the tie rule.

Carriers will never be in this game, so alas.

The rest is just your personal play style. If you don't use orbital defense ships then perhaps tiny hulls have no use for you.

For you they are useless, and for others they serve a function. No big deal. You just don't use them.

When I get the Galactic Guide Book (free survey modules) I build a heap of unarmed (so no maintenance) scouts quickly, tiny hulls with an engine, living quarters and a survey module to grab anomalies.

They can be the fastest ships in my fleet sometimes.

What makes Tiny hulled ships invaluable - and i'm very suprised no one else has mentioned it,,,,, is military starbases!

A fleet at maximum logistics capacity of tiny ships is going to draw down much greater benefit from military starbase support.

This is because the starbase support module effects are multiplied according to ship numbers in the fleet, therefore the more ships you can put in a fleet, the better.

*This stratagy is especially useful if your most powerful ships possible are not powerful enough to avoid heavy casualties*

While this is technically true, in that it applies on a per-ship basis and therefore the more you have in a fleet the stronger your fleet will conceivably be, GC2's fleet combat is weak at best, and the huge hulled ships contribute more to your military rating, which is the unfortunate primary purpose of military starbases for most of the playerbase at this late date.

I was going to write more of this post, but it occurred to me that I don't know where or how starbase attack assist bonuses fall when determining individual weapon firing rolls in DA/TA.  Would this be the "all bonuses applied to first weapon and treated as supershot" thing mentioned in the wiki?

I must admit, combat is not something I had paid enough attention to.

In my current game, I haven't built any tiny ships, but those that I've been buying/trading for have become tiny colony ships or constructors.  The advantage there is that the ships are already deep in enemy territory and after the first conversion to a constructor and the ensuing Influence Starbase, I can have a ready supply of colony ships that can snag many uninhabited planets before I could otherwise get there.

Beyond that, I don't have a use for tiny ships. 

Of course, the other ships I'm buying/trading are getting the same treatment, so this isn't specifically about the tinys.  Just saying that there's some use for them, even if it's for a very short time.

I only get to tiny ships in the late game when i have other ships to fleet with them and enough miniturization to make them something to fear. When you are fighting enemy ships with, say, 500+ attack, a tiny is the same as a small and maybe even a medium, except for some additional firepower. That is, they don't have enough hit[oints or defences to survive.

I bascally use tinies in fleets to give a good punch and take a hit for a larger ship. Maybe I'm mean for using them as shields but I want my large and huge hulls to survive against massive enemy ships.  A tiny can have an attack near 200 (with a couple of red resources and extra hyperion shrinkers etc). Since the can get built like every 3 or 4 turns, you can have a lot of them.

Another good use for tiny hulled ships which i love to do is when i find my larger ships are using the wrong defence or weapon type to the extent that it will be very painful to go into battle....

The AI is fanatically addicted to targeting tiny hulled ships first in battle, so long as they have fairly up do date weaponry, so if my fleets do get caught with their pants down having the wrong weapon or defence type, i can quickly build tiny hulled ships (with the most effective weapon type) and shove enough of them into my fleets so that the big ships will always survive.

Alternatively, if my large ships are so powerful that the enemy cannot touch them, then i may choose to use up the logistics with tiny hulled ships that are just weak enough so the enemy will not target them first. Then they drift around with the big ships gaining experience - eventually having enough hit points to upgrade weapons and still not get targetted. Once i had a good number of tiny hulled ships with 50+ hit points, awesome!

Attack/(Defense+HP) --> Assuming no defense, a tiny ship is 18 times as likely to be targeted as a huge hull, without adjusting for attack.  Since a huge hull can't have 18 times as much weaponry as a tiny hull (standard 115% miniaturization thanks to one hyperion shrinker huge hull at 322 space is 23 nightmare torpedoes i.e. black hole eruptors for 575 attack, whereas a tiny is 34 space at 115% miniaturization for 75-80 attack), only about 7.67x at most and without accounting for fleet attack boosters, it becomes fairly obvious that tinies are a preferential target.

This is in the absence of any hp modules, though.

thanks for the formulae, that will be very handy when i am designing 'piolate fish'.

'Piolate fish' are tiny hulled ships designed to make use of unused logistics with powerful ships that are not seriously threatened by the enemy. They must be weak enough not to attract enemy fire first.

This is the opposite to 'kamakazi' tiny hulled ships which are specifically designed to draw fire away from larger ships which may otherwise be vunerable to distruction by the enemy.

I like putting warp bubbles and other fleet effect modules on tiny ships.  With good miniaturization you can have a ship that only costs 2 logistics points while speeding up and increasing the attack of the rest of the fleet -- and with no weapons, that ship will not be attacked unless the fleet is entirely destroyed.

Instead of making fast, expensive throwaway ships like constructors and transports I'll also build them slow and cheap, and convoy them with a warp bubble ship if I have that tech.  A tiny ship with no maintenance cost will repay many times the cost of building it when you consider the savings from making cheaper throwaways that are still reasonably quick (saves on constructor maintenance as well).