With the scout, you can bring it back home and use it again for offense and defense. As you might expect, in offense and defense situations, scouts are best in large groups. Just think, you can build over 100 scouts for the same amount of resource units it takes to build a single heavy cruiser. For battles against other strike craft, the X and claw formations work well. Use the sphere formation against nonhostile targets like resource collectors and controllers.
Tactics also play a large role in a scout's effectiveness.
Aggressive tactics cause the scout to move slower, stay in formation, and fire its weapon more often. Putting the scout in evasive mode, though, turns up the engines at the expense of rate of fire. But its lower cost means you should have more strike craft than your opponent. An excellent time to use evasive tactics is when you want to reach a position more quickly. You take your large scout group, set them on evasive, and fly them high above and over the incoming enemies.