Everything does have its place indeed.  A scout is supposed to hmmmmmm.....I dont know......scout?  Spamming anything isn't inventive.  The fact that even one is named scout tells you that that class of ship is for scouting.  They all don't have to have heavy cruiser or long range frigate or carrier in their name to be that kind of ship.  Scouts are typically not intended to be the primary damage dealing component of a fleet because they are scouts.  They are supposed to be quick and take enough damage to do their job at scouting effectively.  Their job IS to run around.  They already even have side uses as minesweepers and resource extraction with vasari.  It does take more scouts than lrms to win but thats easily done and cheaper considering you dont have to research it.  They are faster than anything short of strikecraft too so that means they can avoid you all day long if they want to and cause one of their counters(carriers) to build more slowly.  TEC can even kill all your structures with time bombs and keep them killed by killing any contructor that pops back up.  I tire of seeing fleets where the overwhelming majority are scouts even 45 minutes into the game.

[_]-Greyfox 

Yes but then you woudl nerf the scouts vs each other. Like when i try to defend neutral againt vasari scouts I'll more often then nor use scouts of my own.

The real way to iliminate scouts as a rush unit is to reinstate carriers in their role.

As I said scouts them selves aren't the issue. but the carriers. People use the scouts to do the job the carriers should be doing. But yes scouts have otehr uses and those uses should remain and people should learn them.

I think that returning carriers to 1.1 would eliminate scouts as they are being used now for a couple of reasons.  First off being that the LRMs that scouts are being made to kill would be built less in favor of carriers(basically killing off the prey means the predators starve).  Also fighters would kill scouts more efficiently than scouts kill carriers.  I was always fine with carriers even before they were nerfed.

[_]-Greyfox

I made a post to give as much explanation as possible about this. Scouts aren't impossible to counter. If anything they're incredibably easy to counter. Check my post. It's in this strategy section too.

The pirate HC? What are you on? Not sure what you actually meant there. The post is up now.

Problem here it doesnt work as well as fallout or Oblivion smaller communaty and lsot fo people don't read the forums and play online. In the end it wouldn't work. Sot he game it'S self needs to be fixed in the official way. And the active member of this communaty are trying to help the devs along that road.

Not when they had the armor upgrade. Scouts > Carriers ~> Corsairs > Scouts

As a relative newcomer to the game Ive learnt that IF you get hit by scout spam early, you biggest ally is build speed. Scouts have to be 3v1 or more to be effective. Once engaged the enemy has to build more and faster and you only need to build 1-1.5 for every three.

That being said, if the enemy has 30-50 scouts in your HW early game, then you missed something before they got there.

However, its fascinating to see the way scouts can be used.

Questions on scouts?

Can you set them to move in a permanant patrol around 4-5 planets. Set it and leave them go round and round?

Is there anyway to determine where they will go to autoexplore? If the map is 50% controlled by you, will they avoid your 50% and mostly move around enemy territory? Thus as you own more of the map, they only move around smaller areas?