Not to mention, a fully outfitted military starbase will take something like 52 constructors. That is a lot of shipbuilding which could be going for war ships.

as mumble and moose have suggested, the partially subjective answer is that military bases aren't worth it. moose points out how much production you must dump into these things, but in reality it's much smarter not to fully outfit them. still, it's a huge production sink. the one advantage to building up starbases is that the maintainence fees aren't there as they would be with if you'd built 52 fighters instead of 52 constructors.

i have played in games where i've made thorough use of military starbases. i'm thinking it might work better in DA. since engines are so expensive and bulky now, it's actually the speed boosting features of the military bases that grab my attention. i can make swarms of cheap fighers with no engines and only 1 defense point. i focus on adding modules to boost ship speed and defense, and i try to lay down my bases in a grid such that they cover their areas as evenly as possible (4 spaced in a square where each is 7 parsecs away from the other, and six parsecs from the next square - this makes the center of each square the weakest point). the downside to using military SBs is that you can't use your 4 bases per sector for other things, such as economy.

even if you just focus on the speed boosts, this will provide a vastly more mobile defense of your home turf for only 3 constructors per base. that's worth it in DA economics, if you ask me. but is it worth the loss of increased trade revenue and production? well, that's a question you'd have to answer for yourself.

Military starbases can be pretty difficult to master. Their real strength is their attack and defense bonus is applied to any ship that meets the prerequisites (1 point of attack for attack assist, and 1 point of defense for defense assist). You only have to pay the cost for the modules once (per starbase that is).

This means two things, 1 in order to gain maximum benefit out of the attack assist modules, you are going to have to use a lot of ships, usually small or tiny hulls with lots of logistics. Second, because the attack assist and defense assist bonuses are not directly tied the ships, its not as big of a loss to lose a weaker ship that meets the prerequisites than it is to lose a ship built to be that powerful without the assist bonuses.

I am a big fan of military starbases (at least, on higher difficulty levels), but I do not believe in spamming them all over your influence zone, or waiting till late in the game to use them. You use military starbases early in the game, when their bonuses are most pronounced, and you wait till you KNOW you're going to use it before slapping it down. It's not doing you much good if it's just sitting there and no battles are happening.

I've made the suggestion on at least three seperate occasions that starbases should be moveable. Whether they can be towed by a special ship or move under their own power, this should be a very slow rate perhaps 1 parsec/week. But allowing these starbases to move would increase their usefullness.

I don't like the movable starbase idea. Starbases are basically 'bases' in space, or among the 'stars'. So how do you move them?

Maybe, it should work like this. They add new modules to Ship Builder, which would grant military bonuses to nearby ships. And each ship would focus on a specific feature. For example:

Armor Assister

Increases nearby ships armor by 1 point.

The idea being the more assist modules you have, the stronger your ships. Someone could probably come up with a pretty good story reason for it, too.

Or, just use Military Resources. If you have one or two, that might help. However, Galactic Resources are limited.

i'll drink to that. they could also use increased hit points. i'd love to see them more integrated into combat, so that SBs could participate in fleet combat using 'docked' ships, as was originally intended. c'est la vie.

Sounds like the javascript is having troubles, but I've not noticed anything myself. If you problems persist, I'd say to hit up websupport.

One possible use of military starbases is next to a galactic resource you're mining, especially the economy ones, perhaps morale or even shipbuilding. Myself, I park fleets under the mining ops to try to protect them. A military starbase in the same area would lessen the need of having a "real" or formidable fleet presence there, a few defenders could keep the mining chuggin' away.

I like starbases and often make a few military ones as "staging posts" (where I put rally points to begin building invasion fleets). I can't disagree with the earlier posts, though . . . their "window of usefulness" is pretty short.

There is no problem playing economy/tech game on normal , because game is still relatively easy. You only need to keep your oponents occupied ... I played as a terran going for influence victory. 9 oponents. All of them taken out by influence starbases or other civs (wars initiated mostly by my bribes ).

imo
Military starbases are not worth BCs they cost and time you need to put up enough constructors. To keep your ass out of war , you need to have only around 100 military rating and good relations with others which is really no problem. You will need one defender (ship of custom design , no engine , only weapons) on every planet + maybe later some capital ships to do some beating to guys unwilling to accept your culture (Yors , Thalans ...). Because AI isnt capable of deploying really strong ships on normal diff (or I never encountered anything that can counter my offensive fleets) , fleet of some caps(and I dont mean medium hulls , I mean real caps) will destroy everything they will throw at you. Actually , two big ships will be enough. Its also good to keep some med hull ships around your borders (fast ships) later in game , when you have large territory in your hands. Spore ships ftl .

Hello Warden,

There is actually a strategy with starbases I picked up in this forum, but it is regarded as cheese (close to cheating), but I played it in two tough games and won both by a large margin. The point is that it is crippling when you are forced to war when you are not ready. You want to have masses of fast troop transports on the border of your victim and take him out in just a few turns. What you don't want is an AI comming your way and take out those transports causing you to loose billions of soldiers for nothing.
The strategy to avoid this goes as follows: Pick a place within your empire where the blue lines cross (sector borders). There build 4 military bases in each sector (which is the maximum per sector) just there where the sectors meet for a total of 16 starbases. Do not build a lot of modules on them just 'laser equalizer' and 'micro something' on each. So each base needs 4 constructors (the base itself, the MKII improvement, and the two modules). Meanwhile build cheap fighters (tiny hull+1laser+engine) and surround the starbases with those fighters.
Now each fighter will have an attack value of 33, and each ship costs you just 1 bc per turn. So if you got a hundered fighters or so your military will look formidable and you are safe. Those starbases will cost you a few hundered bc a piece but they are worth every penny!
Now you can go for a diplomatic or war strategy of your choice.

The second strategy with starbeses, which is also considered cheesy is with economic starbases: Take the planet with the highest PQ and build 25% industry on it and 75% reaserch factories. Build 16 economic starbases around them. (12 of them must be located in nearby sectors). Equip each so that it gives you a 21% bonus on research totaling some 336%, build the technological capital and the omega research factory and the nano computers on that planet. Et voilà, a reaserch planet totaling more than 1'000 reserch points.

Have fun!

Evil Stormbringer, the strategy with the military starbase, didn't work for me at first either. The AI were always ahead. There are some points you have to consider additionally. First the AIs will trade tech and always be ahead of you unless you trade also. If you got something they don't, trade it to as many AIs that you have contact to including the minors. If the trade option is on you must outtrade them.
The second point why one might fall behind is the size of ones initial empire. The trick that works for me is to build on the home world as many industry as it takes to build a colony ship (one you designed yourself for speed!) in two turns with the production slider at 100% and the social slider at 99% and the military slider at 1% and the research slider at 0%. After just a few turns you produce a colony ship every other turn. The first world you colonize you should also build industries and a spaceport. Every few turns you should check whether you can reasearch sensors in one turn (research at 100% production 100% rest 0%). Then for one (at most two) turns do only sensor research. Switch back to 99% social 1% military and produce with your home world colony ships and with your second world 'Reaserch Frighters' (Freighter Hull with an exploration module, lots of engines and maybe some lifesupport). Send of those freighters to explore anomalies (Some are juicy 2500 bc). Those freighters (and the flagship) will generate the money during early exploration while you build up an economy. (The economy rating of my current game is way over 200).
After this kickstart I change to 20% military 40% social and 40% research (always at production 100%) building the 64 constructors needed for the 16 military starbases and cheap fighters as described above. When I'm top dog in miltary rating I do also the econ starbases.
I admid that before you become top dog there is a phase where the relations of the AIs drop dramatically. Pay em off! With a working economy you can pay your neighbors 100 bc per turn if it drops below cool. Usually I research into diplomatic (turn those research freighter into regular freighters (trade!) and research into the better goverments, then the relations will go up fast.

BTW: My settings are gigantic, everything abundant research slowish tech trade usually off. staring tech: engines and stellar charts.

Have fun