When I first start out I will build maybe 1 or 2 tiny ships per planet (and if possible park 1 on a resource and stick a cheap weapon (usually laser) on each (no defense) just to deter any would-be bullies from getting any ideas.

This I think also helps your military ranking even if only slightly so (correct me if I'm wrong here).
After that I just leave them and pretty much forget about them until I research med. hulls and better weapon tech.

I learned the hard way by trying to go strictly "influence" or "technological" victory, forgetting my military and thereby getting "beaten up" early to mid game because of this oversight and then trying to scramble to correct the damage (almost too late at that point).

But yes, as a rule now I build a few tiny ships very early just to get some respect from the other AI's.

my smalls actually stand pretty good in war maybe because i only put one gun on them and then the rest is defense.

I think Small Hulls should only be used to fill in logistics gaps that bigger hulls leave behind, relegating them to usage as 'escorts'.

Otherwise, Medium Hulls are the most effective early on, and then you get Large and Huge hulls later which are even better, but in most cases(IMO), uglier .

As for Tiny Hulls, you can bolt on one defense and one weapon and anything else in the remaining space, and fleet together as many of them as possible. Then you put up an array of four military starbases in a certain sector, and upgrade them to make them as powerful as your tech allows. That way, the SBs give the same bonus to each of those tiny-hulls in the swarm fleets to make a rather powerful early to mid-game interception force.

It doesn't take much research effort to tech up to Starbase Conquest Strategy, and the tiny swarms are effective until huge hulls come along late in the game and swat them aside. However, the sheer number of constructors required to set up such an array and the sheer inflexibility of the plan makes it impractically expensive.

Such a system can also be used to immobilize passing enemy ships by surrounding them with tiny ships and using Interdictor Beams on them, or it can be used to propel offensive fleets of larger ships by using Stellar Wakes and Inverse Tractor Beams on them, but IMO, it's not worth the price.

I'd only use a couple of Star Furies very early in the game to try and trick anyone into thinking I'll go down laser road, and to have a symbolic 'military' while I research he techs required to build my true military designs.
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EDIT: Well if you have 7 inherent logistics and have completed any one branch of weaponry, you can have fleets of 29 tiny 1/1 attack/defense cheap ships boosted by 4 military starbases to a total:

Attack: 153 per ship. 153 x 29 = 4437 attack per fleet!!! Without any further bonuses!
Defense: 29 per ship(vs each attack type). 29 x 29 = 841 defense per fleet.
Speed: 8pc/wk speed boost to all of your ships.
Enemy Speed: All enemy ships slowed down by 4pc/wk.
Cost: 44 bc per ship = 1276 bc per fleet.(Using a Railgun & Armor Plating on 27-size hulls)
HP: 5 x 29 = 145 hp per fleet.

These tiny fighter swarms will be able to kill fleets of all-attack huge hulls even late in the game. Combine it with First Strike and maybe a 25% or 50% Luck bonus and no one will be entering that sector easily. However, I don't think it's very useful/feasible outside of an abundant galaxy where each sector is dense and you have plenty of planets to fund this thing.

And 29 tiny fighters will look great using First Strike and swarming over 5 hapless dreadnoughts, who thought they were the biggest offensive meanies in the galaxy, and are gone before they could wonder what hit them.

Further Edit: If you max out the tech tree, attach 6 more modules to each military SB, and fit 3 Black Hole Eruptors + 1 Black Hole Generator to each tiny fighter, you'll get 299 attack per fighter and a fleet attack of... 8671!!! Effective in killing even highly defensive dreadnought fleets(with a luck bonus). But then, each tiny fighter would cost 605 bc!
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What huge-hull 'dreadnought' do you get for 400 bc? The huge hull itself costs 320 bc. Or are you calling all Medium/Large/Huge hulls 'dreadnoughts'?

I've never found a good use for tiny hulls but I use small hulls as my basic fighting unit in every game. I find that a small hull with a pair of psionic beams and 3 or 4 engines depending on my engine tech and miniaturization level can destroy fleets of dreadnoughts as long as my logistics is high enough. I can take out fleets of huge hull ships mounting decent beam defense and BHE's with enough of these. They're cheap and quick to build and that's good because you can run through a lot of them.

Get your logistics up near 60 and put 19 or 20 of these in a fleet and it wipes out pretty much anything. You take a lot of losses so you need to have lots of replacements but for DL games nothing can beat this combination. I assume that for DA this may not work at all given that each weapon can fire at separate targets, but in DL anyway this strategy rocks.

When I don't want to look like the game chump to the other AIs I will often build a handful of smalls with weapons only towards the start of the game.

For DL, true. For DA, it's a different story.



Yup. My Medium Hull designs cost 300-1200 bc depending on how far up the tech tree they are. But I wouldn't call Medium Hulls 'Dreadnoughts'.

Actually, I wouldn't call ANY ship Dreadnought except for the early 1900s British battleships. Huge hulls would be Capital Ships.

As many have said mainly early to show some force smalls are the way to go.

The problem I've had skipping to mediums is it tends to take too long to get them going, and even if you do, you don't tend to have the concentrations of them you need. (or they're not in the right places)

The nice things about the smalls is its easy to use them later in the game as your standard defenders. (fleet them up at your starbases, set one to gaurd key areas, and leave them on forward planets to stop invasion)

Otherwise I try to get to large hulls for the bulk of the game with enough defense to make them neigh invincible.

Given that the actual construction is done by nanites, I imagine that most of these long haul materials deliveries are done by just a couple of driving partners, husband and wife teams, or the occasional heroic lone trucker overdosing on coffee, 'bennies', and country music.   

Plenty of room in the cab over model.

drrider

Small hulled ships are fun! They make great kamikazes that are cheap. Get a few levels of mini, slap an ion engine or a warp engine on that puppy and blow stuff up.

On a side note, I did play the Yor once and made ONLY tiny hulled ships. It was a lot of fun, swarming enemies with a load of little bugs. Occasionally you get the 3 or 4 fighters that would live through some battles and get a lot of exp and they turned into super fighters   

Their invaluable in DL against high end weapons. An enemy ship with an attack value of 200! so what, they only get whatever the hitpoints of your tiny hulled ship is.