The weapons and defenses you put on your starbases are for the starbase to defend itself. The mining starbase really should have the ring removed, as after the base is built it affects your entire empire, not just what's in the ring.

The military starbase could potentially help you out, assuming you built the correct modules. Anything that gives a ship bonus will boost that aspect of each ship in the ring - ie if you build a beam assist module on your base, each ship in the ring will have one extra point of beam damage added to the weapons on the ship itself.

Military starbases are only situationally useful. It's economically inviable to build them everywhere, but building a handful of really pimped-out ones with overlapping rings can let you park cheap ships in the area to boost your military rating. In other situations, you'd be better off building an additional warship or two instead of the constructors needed to build the base.

The modules that help your ships have a small star fighter symbol next to the weapon type symbols, which easily denotes it as a ship assist module at a glance. They also have "Ship Assist +[X] Attack/Defense Beam/Missile/Mass" in the Module description and have a different thumbnail to the Starbase Weapons/Defense's. Ship Assists Modules are always further down the list than Starbase Weaponry, so you might have just not seen them. If you scroll down then you will find all of the ones that your tech levels currently have available to you.
Note that you can only add ship assist modules to your Military Starbases, Economic, Influence and Mining base's cannot build Ship Assist Modules.

Fate,

Just to tell you that influence SBs can be very, very useful: just finished 2 games in a row where I won using influence SBs to flip the planets of an entire race one by one.
I added defense modules to some of them (the ones closest to my enemy's home planet), which helped them survive an early attack; I didn't want additional warships because of the maintenance cost involved.

A mining SB gives you an extra edge (a few % to your economy or military can help a lot), and adding mining modules increases this bonus - don't underestimate these effects!

yes. when it comes to mining SBs, just forget about "the blue ring" entirely (which will be other colors for other interfaces - a more technical term is "area of effect").



IIRC, military SB bonuses don't affect ships in orbit... but i'm not totally sure. can anyone else verify or shoot this down?

IMO the best things SBs can do for you tactically is sensor coverage. the AI rarely builds fast ships, and it's usually much better to take the fight to them rather than waiting for them to show up on your doorstep.

The only way to get any of your ships TOGETHER in single battle is to fleet them (special exceptions for certain planetary improvements and orbiting ships, but that is a side issue.) You CANNOT fleet ships and SBs together (despite the fact that SBs have logistics values), so your ships will never show up on the battle screen with your SB (in the current version of the game, it might change.)

However, if your ships/fleets are stacked with an SB, an enemy attack on that square should 1st engage whichever element is 'tougher', in the arcane estimation of the game engine (actually, it does a pretty good job of calling this right.) If your fleet is stacked a hex or 2 ahead of your SB, the enemy AI often will go for the ships first, but it is capable of making a strategic decision to avoid your fleet and go for the base behind, especially at higher difficulty levels.

drrider

The Influence ring that you see on the map screen is not specfically the 'area of effect' of an SB's special purpose.

It is the area that is brought under your Influence by the presence of a SB. Althought the degree of influence within a SB influence area can be incresed, by racial bonuses and Civ-wide influence resource mining, and for Influence SBs by specific influence enhancing modules, the area covered by SB influence never grows. You can see this clearly sometimes when the Super-Influence random event strikes. Planet influence boundaries expand dramatically over a couple of turns, SB influence rings (that aren't temporarily swallowed up) don't change.

The SB 'area of effect' for its special purpose (military assist, production & trade boost, or influence boost) is approximated by the shaded area and animated dotted line that appears when you select (left-click) the base. The intended radius of that 'area of effect' is 8 parsecs. In practical terms, the area that will be affected is better stated as 'a pattern of squares that are touched by a circle around the SB 8 parsecs in radius.' If a square is just 'nicked' by that dotted circle, it gets the benefit.

drrider

Don't ships get some sort of additional bonus if they are in orbit around a planet and under a SB? Or is that something I was dreaming? And thats ignoring things like the added HP structure or the Spin Control, I know those have to be in orbit for the bonus to apply.

The SB does increase stats for ships in orbit if its under the influence of the sphere, but I think it gets an additional bonus for just being in orbit as well, but I could be wrong on the second point.

Nope, Military Starbases never defend planets. How do you expect them to shoot the enemy when there's a big ol' planet in the way? That's why you have Orbital Fleet Manager buildings. When you build these on your planets, the ships in orbit automatically come together in fleets to defend the planet.

As for fleets outside of planetary orbit, yes, you have to point them manually at the target.

Nope, and it never says that in the documentation.

Sentry = inactive and won't be focused on as the game cycles through your ships with moves left, unless there is an enemy or friendly alien ship within sensor range.

Guard = inactive and won't be focused on as the game cycles through your ships with moves left, unless there is an ENEMY ship within sensor range.


You still have to do the moving yourself when the ship gets focused on. And believe me, if you are using this feature for early warning with sensor loaded cargo hulls, thats the way you want it, because the ship that sets off the alarm may be a scout, may be afighter, or may be a fleet of 5 dreadnoughts.

There is no 'Strip Alert' standby status. Maybe there should be.

drrider

you can also set your ships to auto attack but they pick their targets.

but this can only be used if there is an enemy with in sensor range.

From the Manual, page 53:
" Sentry: This tells a ship to be idle until another ship - friendly or enemy - comes near."

drrider

this wasn't a bug AFAIK, it was a design choice.