The hyperion shipyard is most useful for building ships with no engines. The main advantage of ships with no engines is the cost saving, although the space saving is of some use. Don't bother posting if you're just going to say something like "at that stage of the game, I don't care about money". At that stage of the game you should have already won anyway.
Your examples feature very high tech levels. The final-stage weapons are very very powerful, eliminating the battleship advantage. Fair enough. If you're hit by a black hole it doesn't really matter how big you are. During the early&mid tech levels, however, the larger hulls have a much clearer advantage. I've never had a game go on long enough to even reach black hole drivers, even on a large galaxy with suicidal skill level aga
Military starbases add to the attack and defence of every vessal, so large fleets of tiny ships recieve a bigger bonus than small fleets of huge vessals. For this reason, if you are using military starbases to assist you, you are best off with small hulls. I use tiny hulls with 1 armour 1 attack for defence, to recieve maximum benefit/cost from starbases.
GalCiv2 Forums
Anyone played Age of Empires on hardest against the AI? It builds the heighest tech units about 30 seconds into the game whilst you've still got guys with pebbles as your best units. It teleports troops into the back of your base. It moves every one of its units simultaneously And you can still beat it.. It is a challenge, but there are only a limited range of options available, so there is little replay value... you can only watch the computer
In your colonies, hover the mouse over the morale, and it will tell you what's causing the unhappiness. A good rule of thumb is to have one entertainment tile per food tile. If you are in a large amount of debt, this lowers your population moral.
GalCiv2 Forums
If you don't build military OR social, can we please get the cash instead? Quite often I don't actually want to pump out too many more ships, from a planet which is a long way from the front (in a huge galaxy!)