I doubt we'll have this problem, considering that Frogboy said this:

"I don't plan to have the AI design ships in GalCiv III in the sense it did in GalCiv II. I will give it a bit of a try but the ships have a lot more sophistication to them this time (very easy for a human but much harder for a computer, traveling salesmen problem here). Instead, I am planning to have the AI look at every ship design any player has ever designed and do evaluation on that and pick from that. So the better players get at designing ships, the better the AI will get."

Instead, the AI will spam lots of mediocre to pretty good ships, which serve as nothing more than a speedbump for our ultimate ships of doom. Which are, in turn, used by the AI next game, utterly crushing us. 

In all seriousness, I really hope Frogboy's plan will fix this. It got really annoying sometime.

I think it'd be easy to cut down on ship spam. Just make the game so that it rewards larger more powerful ships and have the AI favor larger more powerful ships, decommissioning or upgrading the ones that get rendered obsolete by technology.

At which point we'll instead have people complaining about how small ships are useless once larger ones are researched.

Really when you think about it, they should be. X-wing's only beat Death Stars in movies!

Fate,

Isnt it already the case?  In galciv 2, larger hulls always give you more bang for your buck. And obsolete ships do 0 damage to a properly defended ship, making it totally useless, Beside for military ranking in diplomacy.

In my last game the Drengin declared war on me, convinced about their higher military they could give me a whoopass.

One stack of 5 of my highly shielded medium sized ships destroyed 20 full fleet in one turn suffering only like 5 damage.

It's been quite a while, but IIRC small ships were useful if you were outgunned because they couldn't all be destroyed in one hit. I had a lot more success fighting the Dread Lords with smaller ships than with bigger ones until late enough in a game that I had really advanced equipment.

Besides, this time we have carriers and fighters. I'd expect the intention is for those small ships being launched from the big ship to be useful.

And video games.

Yeah I'd have to agree, it does already happen to some extent.

High-quality small ships could work if the logistics were low enough, or as defenders, or if larger hulls had a high enough cost.

I seem to recall the same, I think ive beaten the dread lords with legions of small chips during the campaing, this might be true for when you are extremely outgunned and facing limited number of ships.  ( Like the DL campaing. )

  But in my actuall custom games, it never happens.

Smaller ship could always be used as a desperate measure because of their lower cost and construction time. But in practice I tend to use hull plating, high defense and make use of the upgrade feature as much as possible.  Result My ships are very tough and survive battles and get to very high level. I recall I had a medium hull lev 25 ship with like 160 hp in my last game

It really depends on if there's a need for such units towards the end of the game.

After reading the replies on this thread, I have to wonder how many people want cakewalks at the hardest difficulty setting.

I hope there is a anti-fighter ship role. Bye bye tiny!

DARCA

Tiny hulls could be absolutely devastating with proper starbase support. All weapons, one with a fleet firepower module, and stuck under multiple military starbases. If the enemy is weak enough you can use the speed boost modules to fling a fleet of 30+ tiny hulls at an enemy fleet, or you can wait until they are closer and you can engage them under at least some of the array bonus (and get back into position in one turn). Starbase boosts are on a per-ship basis, so you get 5 or more times as much bonus power from a fleet of tiny hulls as you would for a fleet of huge hulls.

My big concern isn't cakewalk at the highest difficulty, but mop-up in TBS games in general, Stardock games in particular, tends to be very tedious.