by fahbs2000
They're almost never worth it.After the early game planet grabbing is over, the bottleneck for production becomes production limits. That and automated defense turrets are the only things keeping carriers+fighters from being the only thing you ever want to build.
Even considering fleet supply and production limits, I would almost never build dreadnauts (man oh man are you boned if you draw the "I have 5 dreadnauts and mecatol rex" secret objective). Not only are they an awful value on combat alone, but that one movement speed (with their +1 movement tech being too far down the tree) is a killer. I would build carriers and cruisers (XRD and stasis capsules a lot easier to get) before I got dreadnauts. An abundance of resources with tight fleet supply and production limits? I would spend those resources researching towards war suns.
I know the OP wasn't using mechanized units, but if those are in the game then that's just the final nail in the coffin for dreadnauts and PDS units.
(I did see one game with an amusing use of PDS units. Someone got deep space cannon and put 4 PDS units on a two planet system. The system itself was crap but it was next to Mecatol and two other very valuable systems. The crappiness of the system kept it from being worth invading and he was able to extort a huge sum of trade goods from other players wishing for support fire from the PDSs as the contested systems were fought over.)
