love this concept!

First, why is using our Shipyards for building military ships and the occasional colony/freighter a BAD thing? Do we really care what our shipyards are doing per-se? All we care about is effect no?

What I do understand is that they want Starbases to COST you the time/energy/material that could be used on military ships, but there are cleaner ways to do it.

1) As I mentioned in another thread, make Starbases require a planet sponsor to produce, thus stealing production from yards/military ships.

2) Alternatively, you could add a third slider to the Govern production sliders, you can have Social/Military/Starbases

I prefer #1, but #2 is essentially the same thing, but lets you steal that production from the social projects instead of the military, which is why I prefer #1. I don't think we or Brad should care HOW we steal production from those shipyards, at least not when we are saying "This isn't fun and I need to be doing less of it" and changing things would help.

If building non-military ships from yards is really the goal, I can think of several ways to help with that.

1) Make trade routes multi-ship-able, so we build frieghters more.

2) Make the survey tech MUCH earlier, so we have a reason to build multiple Survey vessels.

3) Mining Ships instead of mining Starbases.

4) Espionage Ships which work just like Freighters, build them, send them to planet, they give you a vision bonus and some more details on the empire. Enough ships and maybe you start leeching credits? Diplomacy penalty is a result of course.

I don't actually LIKE any of those ideas (well, except the survey one), but they accomplish the task of "not just military ships" without being AS repetitive as the constructor mini game.

agree i dont mind that it costs me production to build starbases what i want is a more standoffish system as they have said for the battle viewer you're in charge of the empire not the soldiers in this case its the same i want to build an economic starbase here and im going to direct resources from there

i shouldn't need to go to go to each starbase and order it to order constructors that should be done on its own

i shouldn't need to go to each starbase and tell it specifically what upgrades to do

i shouldn't need to go to each shipyard and tell it to build constructors ( a half fix is in for this but its not working as well as it should as far as im concerned)

i shouldn't need to select each constructor and tell it what starbase it should go to (automatic rally points are currently broken)

i should be able to design an upgrade template that a starbase will follow  

example

go to starbase management

upgrade template manu-Res-Short

this template will attempt to build factorys and research bonus's first and wont buildeconomic/range/milatary bonus's

template manu-Res-Mid

this template will build 1 range extension then econ ring, then factory's and research bonus, finally sensor upgrades and some military defenses

template manu-Res-Far

this template will build both range modules then an economy ring, factorys then research then defenses and sensors 

** edited some typos

I completely agree here. If Shipyards only build military ships....then fine, no problem. But lets not use them as a crutch for what is currently a somewhat clunky system.

I will also echo  the idea of starbases drawing resources from a planet, like the shipyard. All the mechanics are already in place, and it should dramatically reduce the spam that is currently needed.

I  tend to agree building constructors and sending them to your starbases get old very quickly in a sizable empire. 

Early game and on smaller sized maps it is viable.

The problem is in late game - you can often find yourself managing constructors more than anything else, which makes this tedious.

I think the only reason the current constructor/starbase system made it out of alpha is that most of the people in the alpha though Gal Civ II was nearly perfect.  I know when I got into the early beta all of my feedback saying the constructor system isn't fun and using the same system as 2 is bring forward one of the bad aspects of 2 were shouted down by the hard core fans.  Now that the game is bringing in a wider audience there is much more support for better system.  Yes the current system works but it takes a lot of time and isn't fun.  A sponsor system is already in place for shipyards and solves the issue much more simply and without so much time being spent on it.  Yes it will still need some attention but I think not as much as currently.  Even with the request a constructor option.

This isn't really fair, there have been posts that people need too many starbases, and that constructor spam is irritating going back into 2013, this thread's concept was mentioned repeatedly before the alpha even started.

https://forums.stardock.com/449101/page/1/#replies

This thread was one of the earliest, and Frogboy has a reply in it stating:

I don't know why they're not fixing it, I was expecting them to solve the make-work problem a long time ago.

+1 I would like to have another system for upgrading starbases.

I think that it's a good idea to have sponsoring from planets/mining starbases or using their own production (for mining starbase).

The constructors can be used alternatively in order to speed up the construction of a starbase (e.g: for deep space starbases)

Add my signature to the petition.

I just don't like Spam

In my planet sponsorship idea, you would simply add manufacturing costs to each module, the equivalent of a construction ship. The time factor of space travel, is represented by the Decay equation of production being sent to the StarBase.

Tweak either the decay equation (just for bases) or the Manufacturing cost of each module as you see fit to achieve the desired time/cost. You could then even start valuing different modules from each other, making the better improvements take longer to build, as our glorious developers see fit.

The biggest problem under the current system isn't that it involves large numbers of constructors or that "Starbases everywhere!" is the intended design - though the first isn't great and the second is debatable. The real problem is that this is combined with a need for the player to babysit every step of the process.

What I need to make this work as a player is not "Request Constructor" on each starbase.

What I need to make this work as a player is a galaxy-screen command to say "Hey, Governor - build me a starbase of THIS type at THAT location", and the governor takes care of the whole process for me. They order the constructors, they deal with the module selection when each one arrives, and so on. I don't need to deal with it anymore unless I really, really want to.

If that function allows me to define a custom starbase build (because maybe I do or don't want marketplaces or beam weapons or whatnot at a specific one, or I want the defenses built before the functional stuff), so much the better, but right now I'd happily settle for just being able to say "Build me a MILITARY/CULTURE/ECON/MINING starbase right THERE!"

This is just my two cents worth. But the easiest way to fix this issue just be able to put more modules on a constructor. A maximum of 4 would completely simplify Starbase building. this will eliminate any setbacks with the build. I think the Devs have made it quite clear that they are not going to change because this is the way they want it. it will be up to the modders.  In fact there could be improvement techs, to shrink the modules or include it with another shrinking tech.

I do completely agree, that starbase building is just hindering gameplay with micro-management.