"various Ship Speed bonuses available in the game (bonuses from Drive Speed technology, Ship Speed boosts from Military Starbase modules, Gravity Accelerators)."

Any form of speed increase is expensive.

1. The Speed racial bonus costs a whopping 5 pt for a 1pc/wk boost and 8 pt for 2pc/wk. This is ridiculously expensive since you can get a 30% Economic bonus or a 20% Research bonus for just 4 pt.

2. Only Impulse Drive, Warp Drive, and HyperWarp give you speed boosts of 1pc/wk each. And researching Warp and HyperWarp drives too early will leave you weak elsewhere, and if you don't use engines, you'll be stuck with slower ships until you research these techs.

3. Military Starbases need Stellar Wake and Inverse Tractor Beam modules to boost your speed, and for which you need to have Warp Drive and Warp Drive 4. Also, the cost of starbases gets exponentially higher the more you build, so building many such SBs will be economically difficult, and will give your enemies lots of juicy targets.

4. There are no Super Projects or Galactic Achievements that boost your overall speed. Only Gravity Accelerators, a Trade Good, boosts speed empire-wide by 1pc/wk, but requires you to research the entertainment branch up to it's penultimate tech, Zero-G Sports Arenas and then spend the time to build it(or wait for an AI to do the same). The Hyperion Shipyard Super Project also boosts speed, but only for ships built on the same planet as itself.

HOWEVER, this strategy will be almost unavoidable and necessary for Arcean players in Twilight of the Arnor. The Arceans simply have no choice: they have no idea what the hell engines are, and thus can't research shipboard propulsion systems. The other races also realize this, so they are programmed not to trade engine tech with the Arceans. The Arceans instead get specialized planetary improvements that give their ships speed boosts.

" With just a little miniaturization, you can make cheap colony and constructor ships using Tiny hulls, which I like."

I do this. I bolt a Constructor Module on to a Tiny Hull and call it 'Dummy Constructor', which costs only 95 mp. But what has this got to do with your main topic anyway?

Motti Khan has an AAR around here somewhere showing using the "slingshot" effect from military SBs in order to not have to worry about having space for engines. I've also used it on a few games. You can take a speed three ship and have him launching from the Starbases at speed 20 or more, depending on amount of SB's and modules. I believe if you want to go all out you could reach speed fifty with those ships, but your talking a mountainous investment probably only worth it for fun or a gigantic map.

yes, they do. at least last time i tested in DA 1.4 or 1.5, they do. has this changed in 1.6 or 1.7 beta? you just have to make sure the ship starts the turn in a parsec affected by more than 1 SB.

another alternative is the "slingshot array." this is where you build 16 SBs on the intersection of 4 zones. you can gather a fleet of slow ships there and "slingshot" them halfway across the map (or give them an insane number of movement points for a blitzkreig-style invasion).

i won't, myself. i've done it in the past and clearly remember a +32 speed bonus to ships. but military bases are a poor way to do, well, anything much. so i haven't done it in a while. which, therefore means, things may have changed without my knowledge, though i usually read the changelogs thoroughly.

if you're really interested in this strategy but don't trust my memory, i wouldn't take it personally. i was quite surprised to find that military SB bonuses overlap. you could set up a cheat game to quickly construct the SBs in order to prove or disprove me, but i'm not especially interested in doing so.

It's just that the last time I tried this, I had Gravity Accelerator and 4 military SBs all with Stellar Wake and Inverse Tractor Beam modules in the zone and the no-engine ships maxed out at speed 6. I'm running the 1.7 second beta version of DA at the moment.

Ok, that explains some of the things I was seeing: I expected the bonus to be visible as soon as a ship was launched from orbit right after being built, and the bonus wasn't there.

You can get 24 to affect a square. Put them in the middle of a sector, down the edge, not dead center. This lets you use starbases from six sectors.

oh yes, of course! wow that must be some nice bonus research and production if you get a nice planet in just the right place.

I've done that a few times. My favourite setup for that is to give the tiny hulls the cheap, bulky armour and whatever mass driver will fit, giving them one attack and two defense while remaining as cheap as humanly possible! I've also experimented with putting a single, more traditionally built medium hull into their fleets. Since the medium hull is targetted first, the heavy hitters of the fleet (the swarm) are spared destruction.

i have to say it'd be pretty severely devastating on any map size; the +48 movement bonus alone would be the basis of a devastating first strike capability; the movement bonus alone isn't the only advantage, but also the extra space for weapons and defenses it frees up (though I would still include at least 1 engine to help them return faster). remember you needn't destroy an AI's fleets to destroy the AI--they're nothting without planets.

with a sufficient budget, you can also multi-task your array defenses and fleets of constructors needed to build an additional array (if your really that ambitious). armadas of constructors themselves - by putting a single weapon on your mini'structors, will also get the bonuses provided by arrays like these. fleets of them can serve as defense, and also be jettisoned across the galaxy to build even more SB arrays. the cost would be absolutely enourmous, of course: this is really only the sort of thing you do for S's & G's at the end of a game you've already won in some obvious way.

what? i think you have it backwards. there are tons of attack assists, but only 4 defense assistst (protection fields, and an addition module per defense type).

Is there a definitive list somewhere of exactly which technologies allow you to build all of the various starbase modules? Seems like that information is spread all over the place.

I figured the Wiki wasn't completely up to date with DA.