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.

I could refer to history... No fortress has ever been able to survive for eternity, some day, every fortress has been taken/destroyed, at least I don't remember any which hasn't.
I doubt, it would be that much fun, taking out an AI "super-starbase" requiring huge fleets, and that thing even survives a capital assault. But I would like to see the AI defending their SBs heavily.
Still, the major issues is, what to do on >huge maps, where that many enemy ships are around? As I imagine, huge hulled ships are at least the same size as starbases.

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

No, kindly don't, because we're not talking about history, real life, or any variant thereof; we're talking about a game.

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.

I look at SB as forts in space and I think they should be powerful. They are a players power projection tool and as such they should reflect the players capabilities. They are also a first line of defense.

As far as DS9 and SG:A those bases are none military. Food for thought...

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.

I'm sorry, you disqualified yourself. You don't wish to be open for reasons already given, thats ok.
But there is no need to be that aggressive. I grew up with C64, ZXspectrum, so you really should not judge me in that way. Tell me, on what side the foolishness is. Thank you.
A starbase is surely not defeated by a ship bigger than small hull, you may try a different strategy then. In my games, my starbases hold mostly throughout the whole game, you just need to tech/upgrade at the wright moment, and probably stop/change strategy, if the enemy has become very powerful

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?

Man, this is not Q&A, as far as I'm concerned. I just gave my opinion, if it doesn't bother you, thats your problem. I'm sure there are equal numbers of players who consider them ok.
And you still missed the point, please read again. Of course, they are weaker on maps >medium, which seems logic to me, since starbases lose their importance on bigger maps.
In RTS game language, its massing

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.

With all due respect, I think you are missing the point of starbases. They shine the best when used in conjunction with something else, not on their own.

I would like them to be stronger in combat given the cost, sure. But, especially with the adding of repair modules, the game has come a long way.

To say that all starbases are too weak for what they do suffers from looking at one starbase. Sure, a +25% ish bonus to production to a planet or series of planets might seem pricey for the 7 constructors... but you build an array of 24 for an almost +600% bonus to a choice set of planets and you can outproduce anybody.

The highest end score grinding revolves almost completely around the 16-24 military starbase strategy.

Want to stop enemy fleets on your border? Throw a series of clustered starbases with nothing but -3 to enemy movement on each one. With enemy fleets slowed to one move each, even unarmed ships can endlessly sacrifice themselves to protect those weak starbases.

And influence starbases? Have you ever worked hard to get an alliance with a much more powerful civilization only to systematically flip every one of his worlds to your side? Not easy without piles of influence bases.

Bonuses from resource starbases all matter as well. None of the above strategies and uses of starbases in this game - as you like to emphasize - depends on the military stats of a starbase.

Starbases are key components to the game, just not the combat component. And now we just got terror stars....

~ Wyndstar

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...).

That's great. Find them and bring them here so they can discuss their point of view.



Finally, a rational mind.

However, my question remains: why even have things like military modules on starbases if they are apparently so weak? Why even allow me the option of giving my starbase +5 to Shield Defense if it is apparently pointless? Why offer me the illusion of choice? Should military starbases not be powerful immobile behemoths that, when properly equipped, be able to defend me (Or at the very least themselves from any equally equipped mobile threat (Since I have sacrificed mobility in favor of firepower)? Or are they to be regulated to a purely supportive role, such as the roles you pointed out?

This is the real question here. If the techs exist to increase the defense and offense of a starbase, then this insinuates that Stardock intended them to be feasible in combat. As of right now, they only hold up in this role for a short period of time, till mid game tops, and by then it is far too cumbersome to craft a starbase that can stand up to a direct assault when you could simply make another ship. Is this how it should be? That is the question.

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.

With all due respect as well, you might have missed the point of most people in this thread: The problem isn't that starbases are weak or worthless, the point is that you're better off building ships instead of using the weapon and defense modules, at least in the later stages of a game. That is a pity.

Additionally I still think that some of the ship assist modules should give a percentage bonus instead of a fixed one.

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.

The option would be to allow to add the starbases to the fleet. In that case starbase would not attract enemy fire, unless it is more powerful than guardian ships. And it will make sense to build weapons on the starbase, because the starbase would be able to assist in combat.

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.

Well, I don't want to get into a arguement about this...but I want to weigh in one more time. With the new costs involved in maintaining unarmed ships on top of the cost and number of constructors needed to build one, a starbase should have a bit more survivability than it does currently. A starbase should take a fleet of ships at equal tech levels to destroy, not a single ship. Sure, if the single ship is at a higher tech level, it would make sense for it to be able to overpower the starbase...

A starbase is a MASSIVE investment in resources. It's disconcerting to see such a huge investment in time and resource to be flicked off the map by a single ship.

If I put all the effort into researching the techs, building the constructors, constructing the starbase a module at a time I want to see it be able to stand up to more than a couple ships at equal tech. Especially my military starbases.....

From my perspective, they work fine up till mid game. Let's just add a few more tech levels of modules to take them on into the end game.

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.

@JMiddleton - we are of like mind regarding development of SBs.

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...

Here's the thing that kind of made me upset with the original comment by WillytheMailboy, and subsequent ones by MrKorx. While it's true that no static defense has defeated every enemy that has faced it, but most static defenses do pretty well. In the Battle of Bunker Hill, 1000 American troops held off 5000 British redcoats for 3 charges, while being bombarded by the British Navy. British loses were 2.5 times the number of American loses. In the Battle of the Alamo, somewhere between 180 and 250 soldiers held off 6000 mexican troops for 13 days. That's over 20 to 1 odds. Obviously it takes a far superior force to dislodge combatants from static defenses (unless the static defense's commander's name is General McClellan) . In endgame, 1 small ship taking out a starbase is equivalent to the Charge of the Light Brigade, but with the 600 winning. Which is why they need to be balanced better.

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.