Mining starbases increase the relevant stat of your empire (economy, research, morale, military, influence) by the percent listed. Note the bonuses are additive, not multiplicative - two resources mined at 39% will give 78% bonus, not 93% (Stat * (1.39 *)) not (stat * 1.39 *1.39).

Research bonus gives additional research output, so you get more output from the same number of buildings. Economy bonus increases the amount of money you get from the same population and tax rate. Morale increases the approval of your empire. Military increases the attack and defense of your ships.

Influence increases the ammount of influence you get from planets and starbases. It will increase tourism income, but not by a large factor. Your planets will be more resistant to flipping, and will more easily flip others.

... which is why the AI will go after your resource starbases as much as it can. Now, it won't bypass all of your planets to get to them, but the AI will make any nearby ones a top priority. Protect them well.

In TA with tech trading on, you can get a max bonus even higher than 39%, but I forget how high.

An important corollary to the point Zyx makes in reply 5 is that you'd be smart to assign a few constructors to Vulture Duty by keeping them relatively close to resource nodes currently owned by minors or another major. Both minors and majors tend to lose their mines quickly during wars because they aren't very good at defending them. If you're not involved in the war and have a fairly high military rating (i.e. you don't look like easy meat to the AIs), then you can snap up a newly-freed node quickly without having had to get your hands dirty by attacking the previous installation.

One constructor gives a 5% bonus.

And in TA with tech trading on, the Thalans (and possibly the Korx) can get up to 60% per mine.

However, unlike theresource starbases, economic starbases don't give any bonuses to planets production until the second constructor adds a module.

The green resources that you mine will give the bonus to your economy as a whole. I'm not sure what exactly gets the bonus though.

Economic starbases will give a boost to trade routes that travel through their area of influence, if they have the trade boosting modules.

What I use the economic starbases for is the added bonuses to social, military and research on planets in their area. I like to have at least one covering most of my planets. Only lone isolated planets won't get them. They can be a nice addition to your Tech capital planet.

I haven't done the math on them, but I'm *fairly* sure green resources increase the money you get from taxes - e.g if a planet is making 50bc at a given population and tax rate, it will make 55bc when you get a 10% bonus. I'm also fairly sure trade income is not affected at all.

A fully pimped out starbase with Thalan tech is pretty well invincible, at least to what AIs are likely to throw at it. Even more so if you can get the standard fortification techs as well as the Thalan one. It's something like 77 defense in each category before bonuses, and plenty of available weapons. I've seen fairly large high tech fleets lose to these beasts.

Well, there's the plain language meaning. Trade is an element of the overall 'economy' and the UI describes the bonuse as 'economic.' But calling them 'taxation bonuses' probably wouldn't sound very good to some folks.

I should have added

I wasn't arguing your accuracy, just making fun of this Nth instance of software wording not quite mathching plain language meaning. It's kind of a professional thing with me. I'm one of those underpaid folks who goes around trying to do what passes for documentation & text-related QA these days. I'm really stoked to see Stardock carving another trendsetting path with their plans to hire real, live editorial types. It can be thankless work inside a dev shop, but when done well it yields better products.