What I'd really like, is for the ability to design the starbases in the shipyard. Let them have their own special parts system(if possible), and for example when I design a Military Starbase with a Warp Accelerator, three Rail Cannons and a Sniper Drone module, I get to choose which of those modules I want to install when I bring a constructor to a new Military Starbase.
That, and it would make the Drengin able to design starbases on rocks, which would be awesome and orky.

Yeah this really needs to be how its done, I think it remove alot of the scalability issues.

Kindly, even a game should at least be based on some reality. I do not want to have an unrealistic powerful starbase, compared to a ship supposed to be even bigger than the starbase, and therefore more hitpoints.

No, it should not necessarily have any semblance of reality in it. If Nintendo listened to people like you in the 80s, we'd never have the Super Mario games.

I don't care if the ship is supposed to be even bigger than the starbase. The starbase can't move. Give me some gameplay related reasons as to why it shouldn't be more powerful, not some tripe about how it "doesn't make sense" or "isn't realistic." Tell me why a fully teched out starbase holding out against a huge ship with dozens of Doom Rays on it is imbalanced with numbers and logic in the context of attempting to obtain balance, not "what makes sense." Enough of that subjective foolishness.

Why should I build a starbase if it not only doesn't move but can easily be defeated by anything above small class ships? Why should they even be in the game if they cannot serve the purpose they are supposed to? Why should I bother researching a fairly long branch of tech tree to get something that is completely inferior to what I could get if I researched an equal amount into the Missile Weaponry tree and the Larger Ships tree? Answer me these questions without using the phrase "It's not realistic," or any variant thereof, please.

No, I'm being completely serious here: What reasons?

So far you've said,

"I do not want to have an unrealistic powerful starbase, compared to a ship supposed to be even bigger than the starbase, and therefore more hitpoints."

"Anybody remembers DS9 when the Dominion attacked? DS9 was heavily defended by an allied fleet. The same applies for SG Atlantis, which is in a sense also a starbase.
A starbase shouldn't survive an attack by huge hulled ships, however I like the spacemine idea."

You've essentially said that a huge ship is bigger than a starbase, and refered to a TV show or something as legitimate reasons as to why they can crack open a 39+ module starbase like a sound smack from a frying pan cracks open an egg. What kind of logic is that for determining why a starbase should or should not be more effective?



Good, we're finally getting somewhere. Now tell me: Why do you think so many people in this thread consider starbases drastically underpowered compared to mobile ships?

Exactly. In late game even large sized ships have much better attack/defense statistics. And it is bad. And starbases should have more hitpoints than ships too. At this moment they have the same number of hit points as medium ships. And it is not enough.

Hmm... I doubt that building and managing 168 constructors would be fun, if you are not into score grinding (And then comes a war, and they are all gone...).

Well, adding +5 eg shields, if enemy has beam weapons, to an eco starbase matters a lot at the begining, it just enables you to get things going quickly from start on. As wyndstar said, Sbs are not to be considered relying on themselves. I would find it cheesy to just build super fortresses all over the map and having no fleet at all. 4 eco bases at start give you a big production boost,and when it comes to war, you just add some defensive modules to key SBs. Sometimes I even leave my ecobases undefended, since it is much cheaper later on to buildup a new eco one with just the production modules. However, I find it always worth, to defend mining,influence and mil SBs.
Example: a totally maxed out SB has about 70 defense + about 60HP(with experience even more, my record: about 100HP) which gives a quite strong obstacle for the enemy to overcome.
The enemy ship has +100 beam, leaving a good chance that the SB will survive, if its only one ship. To me it only depends on the timeframe, wheter you add modules or focus on eg shipbuilding instead. And some attack boosting or slowdown modules come always quite handy. I simply loose better a starbase than a huge hulled battleship, which can move and bring the war to the attacker.
And my question is, why do you want to have a starbase which stands against a super powerful enemy? You defend your colonies, so its logic to me, that you must have the capability to protect your SBs as well.
Tweaking SBs, is riding on the edge, since boosting their defenses by say +10 doesn't really matter anyway, if the enemy keeps sending big fleets with > 200 attack.
I think SBs are designed to assist you at several areas, not only in combat.
It doesn't make sense to me, leaving expensive strategic keypoints undefended without some additional ships. They even can serve as quite powerful bridgeheads within enemy territory.

Exactly.



Perhaps. But I can tell you right now I would have absolutely no reason to EVER build a tiny class ship if that happened. At least now I can get a bunch of those buggers outfitted with a +1 damage and +1 defense part, put them under a military base with ship assist modules, and watch them each become as powerful as small ships.

Seriously, right now starbase ship assist modules are all the smaller ships have going for them. ::/ Make it percentage based and you might as well skip straight to medium ships.

This isn't QUITE accurate.

Short examples of static defenses holding against mobile forces. The English Channel. Germany never was able to successfully invade England in WWII. The Great Wall of China. It didn't stop EVERY invasion, but it stopped the majority of them. There are many other examples, but I don't want to get bogged down with them right now.

From a game play standpoint, I think it would be nice if players could design their own starbases, the same as their own ships. The SB would have access to any of the weapons and defenses you have researched plus mission specific modules like trade, econ, diplomacy, resource mining, etc... They could take advantage of advancing miniaturization technology and could be upgraded the same as ships to incorporate your most advanced technology. I also like the idea of a fleet management module allowing the starbase to participate as a member of any fleet within its zone of control. Starbases would have finite capacity. You could stock them with weapons and defense ending up as powerful as the best ship in your fleet but with very few mission modules - or you could load them with mission modules and rely on fleets to defend them. The point is it would be your strategic decision.

I have a few points to make:

1. Some of you fail to take into account that some forms of immobile defenses required specialized equipment, or specialized tactics to deal with them. Seige weapons like the catapults and bastilas were effective against stone structures like castles. The Great wall of China didn't do so well when the Mongols decided to walk around it until they found the beach where it ended. Treanches were dealt with by using gas warefare, and latter tanks. Japan might of been conqoured by an invasion, but nukes were used instead. Now, as I recall reading, there exists specialized nukes are designed to cause siesmic waves that spells doom for underground bunkers.

If these weapons, or tactics didn't exist, some of these immobile defenses would probally fared much better.

2. One of the problems that starbases face when it comes to upgradeability is, the starbase fortification techs can progress independantly of ship weapons and defenses. To make them much more powerful could result in players getting starbases appropiate to end-game during mid-game or in rare cases, early game.

Possible solutions to this problem has already been posted. Having starbases reflect your current ship techs, automatically getting better weapons, defenses and miniturization as you get them available works. However, the other posted, where you could design your own starbases would work too. Having to balance role specific modules with starbase defenses would result in having no one to blame but the player if the starbase couldn't take a hit (assuming that they could be built powerful enough).

3.


Not a lot of planets would be conquored either...

At last, a breath of fresh air in this old subject. I was warming up to post something like "Because of my play style, I don't often encounter the maxed-base is a wimp situation, but I'd still very much like to see changes to enable stronger bases if I'm willing to pile on the constructors."

But I like this idea *much* better. I can even imagine and accept a notion like needing to add a constructor (or several) to complete an upgrade to a new design. Seems like a lot to ask for 2.0, but maybe for GC3.