They also tend to be unable to stop plage ships. I like making escorts with plague bombs and sure the enemy will kill it, but it only has to fire once.
But I tend to get very good results from my WPs against the AI, and I usually play with strategic combat only. Against a human, I'd prefer a combined defense, or larger platforms. Smalls are still wonderful in the early game and useful in many cases in the mid game.
As for them taking time, I find that I have so many worlds with 1-5 facilities that I can stick them on emergency build and get everything done plenty fast, then they just sit around doing nothing. Why not tack on one more item and build some maintenance-free defence before pumping fighters and/or sats? Gotta be careful on the smaller worlds though becuase they might make it unable to fit any sats.
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