Does anyone actually use Corvettes? I tried to use them, but to me, they are just annoying. Corvettes seem to be too weak to make a dramatic impact on larger ships and too fragile to put a fight against anything but fighters! Does anyone think they should be removed?

No, merely for sentimental purposes, corvettes WERE used in the fiction. Mostly used by privateers, the Corellian corvettes for example were ships seen alot in many fleets, usually for smuggling activities or merely as a sort of bigger and more luxurious long-range transport.

remember the purpose of the mod is not to make a 12 unit game like any retail crap, if its not useful to you don't build it :-p

I think corvettes have a number of good uses. Apart from being able to destroy (or at least hold up) fighters, I've found the corvette to be useful as a fire-absorbing wall.

En masse, they keep the enemy busy while the larger ships get into position. If they get into the middle of an enemy (an AI oppenent), it can cause them to break formation and scatter to try and get clear shots.

And yes, there is that sentimental value...."Did you hear that? They just shut down the main reactor! We'll be destroyed for sure! This is madness!"

Larger ships are more cost-effective, at least in warlords, the reason why there are corvettes and small frigates (also not very usefull) in starwars is when your on a limited budget and need to defend several places, then you'd rather send a corvette and a couple fighters to each point, than build one ISD and hope the enemy attacks whatever its defending.
The problem with this is that currently the AI is VERY predictable, and you'll pretty quickly figure out where the AI is attacking and defend there only, hyperspacing also reduces the need to spread out your forces.
Also if the budget only allowed for 1 ½ ISD you'd have to build smaller ships to use up the rest of the budget after the ISD is built, in warlords you can simply wait another 20 seconds and build another ISD, because of the fact that larger vessels are more cost-effective this is generally always a better move.

IMO the solutions to this are:
1) Slowing down resource gathering, in mining mode this means making moles capacity larger and/or reducing mining speed. In station mode it means stations give a lot of Ru's, but very rarely, same for injections.
2) Make a gametype that requires you to spread out your forces, and an AI that will do the same (this is something I have worked on a lot, and had quite some success with)

En masse hordes of corvettes are due to their short range and vulnerability to turbolasers simply not cost-effective at all, try a reinforcement game without injections and build corvettes for all your starting Ru's, unless the AI screws up and only builds for 50% of its Ru's or something like that you will get your butt kicked.

What EvilleJedi said is true though, having several units that serve the exact same purpose and can be built at the same time is something commercial games fear like the plague, and its one of the things that stand out in warlords. Making sure that they are all built by the AI, using some kind of randomization, would make sure that you get to see all the great models Eville has made for the mod, and it would make the battles more varied and unpredictable, and is something Ive been working on in the passed but never really figured out, if/when I remake my strategic AI for this version of warlords Ill try and include that, for the old version I simply figured out the most cost-efficient ships and hard-coded it to build that only, heh, it was tough to beat, but not very varied.

All your arguments make sense...I never thought of using Corvettes as canon fodder though...I'm going to have to try that!

Perhaps a better incentive would be to make the corvettes more cost-effective. Yea Eville, I know that's a whole "balancing gameplay" thing ... but the other option would be artificial caps on things. Maybe a supply system like Cataclysm

The Assault corvette was quite useful back in the day, since it had some useful "special powers". Maybe we need to make corvettes turn faster, or at least try and make them hard to shoot at.

In .56 they are very useful i only know this from the ai but you can spam these things and disable all production very quickly, so you have a ffew frigates and a capitla they wont be able to stop 20+ corvettes from killing you production facilitys, then they retreat come back again and start picking of your forces very effective.

The problem with simply making them more cost-effective is that with the current system you'd have to make them MORE cost-effective to make them usefull, and then you could simply build them only. Caps are something I thought about while writing my last post, but I hate static caps, and its not possible to alter the caps with script so some kind of dynamic caps aren't doable.

If the assault corvette was the one that could capture ISDs filled with hundreds of stormtroopers and 30 000 angry crewmen, with 30 odd rebels, then you should realize yourself the problem with that. Reducing TLs accuracy vs corvettes is a possibility, but EJ might have a good reason for the very high accuracy currently in place though.

the ability to capture any ship larger than a frigate has been removed for that reason (with possibly the exception of the assault shuttle, space troopers kickass)

I use excort shuttles all the time because of thier concussion missile launcher and blaster turrets
skiprays are also really just heavy fighters, they are useful as well for survivability
lambda shuttle is so iconic it needs to be in there just to be there
the assault transport I have to think about what its value really is

some of the other corvettes are there because they are, honestly the system patrol craft, guardian and corellian patrol boat aren't that useful

Cool thats neat i realy hated it when my sder had to hyper out because of all those darn boarding ships.

THe system patrol carft is pretty useless but hopefully it might be used in hte campaign some time.

But most corvettes are usefully. it is way more efective to buy 20 useful covettes  then to buy 5 frigates.

Meh, you can always use your corvettes as an uber-expensive hyperspace scouting units (when you like playing on larger maps)

and corvets are very effective against fighters.

i find heavy corvets are very usefull. especally the ones with 3 or more types of wepons. (turbolasers. lasers. and missles)

Shame that the AI doesn't seem to like building them at the moment.