I'm hoping beta 3 comes out this week so we will can learn more about how the combat system works.  Paul has talked a bit about how combat works so far and it sounds like swarms of small ships are a viable option.  I'm just hoping that larger ships have some benefits against small ships.  For example I would be really upset if my large ship has to kill small ships one at at time if it can split its fire and still kill the small ships. 

So far in the beta I tend to have a smaller but more adept fleet than most of the other empires and seem to be rated as less powerful militarily.  Its still early so there will likely be a pass or two on the algorithm.

Without knowing what we don't know, I think that a ideal goal would be that all hulls would be equal at a certain ratio and thus valid as a play style. But a bigger hull should always be better under the ratio or else most of the hull techs will be useless and combat will be unbalanced.

I wouldn't be opposed to technology allowing ships to target multiple opponents or scanning tech needed to intelligently determine how much to target on a single ship but every warship only being able to fire at one target at a time is poor warship design.  Even as a game that mechanic doesn't make sense. This also encourages large ships with low offense but huge defenses making large ship fights tedious slug fests if either side can do any damage at that point. I think the targeting technology would be the best option to resolve the issue, that way its a choice for the player to go with a mix of ship sizes, swarms of smaller ships or research the targeting tech and run with larger ships that can take on swarms of smaller ships. 

Maybe small ships can be harder to hit. They are small targets afterall.

Darca with reply four what. All hulls is size with hit points. In star wars big guns couldn't hit small ships and vice versa small ships can't destroy big ships without special weapons that specialized ships had. 

Though I understand the gameplay reasoning, making a ship smaller doesn't realistically make it harder to hit outside of the delay between firing and impact.  Even modern-era targeting tech can easily lock onto small aircraft, missiles, and in some cases even projectiles like mortar shells, and in the case of beam weaponry there is no delay between firing and impact.  Small vessels would only be able to dodge missiles and kinetic weapons by staying so far away from the enemy that they have time to move out of the way (or shoot down the projectile on approach.

Small ships that stay far enough away to have time to avoid missiles and kinetic rounds are too far away to be able to hurt a big ship, I believe. I also would think missiles would be guided with internal systems, making dodging a bit more difficult.