Starbase rangr

They only fire if fired upon. They are more or less designed to upgrade your ships in their sphere of influence. But you have to research that tech line.  

I was a little puzzled by that too, but then the ships have the same "range", so it seemed ok as far as gameplay. It's not like the ships stand off and destroy the base while it sits there and does nothing. That would be agonizingly frustrating.

I was shocked a little while ago by the fact that attacking ships ignored the fleet parked on top of the military starbase altogether and just destroyed it and moved on ... must be nice to be able to fly right next to an enemy fleet, maybe "key their hull" a bit in passing, destroy the base they are parked on top of, and then fly away as if there were no enemy ships anywhere in sight ...    I'm not sure if I want to develop a new strategy by quitting using military starbases altogether, and just treat them as useless fluff, or report it as a bug and hope it could be changed.

With stacked ships/fleets and starbases the AI will shoot at the strongest ship/base first. So if you have a fleet of 3 ships 5at/5def on top of a starbase that has 10at/10def your starbase will be targeted first. If they destroy the starbase they can move on if they wish....

Hope that helped.

Kind of ... I can see where it had something to do with the ship speed, but the military starbase had no attack/defense whatsoever, and the 2 ships (in a fleet) parked on it had a combination or 4attack/4defense. I didn't send the ships out because I wanted to defend the starbase, they were slower than the attackers, I wanted to be sure the attackers were confronted by my fleet so I could get max benefit from the military starbase in the defense, and I assumed approximately the same as what you indicated might occur.

I should mention that it was the second attack on the starbase. The first attack was defeated by the 3 ships parked there (losing one in the process) and the base was untouched. The second attack ignored the 2 remaining ships and killed the defenseless military starbase and moved off on a course for one of the constructors assigned to upgrade the base. The first attack was made by ships that had move points of 2, and second attack by ships with move points of 4 or 5. My first guess was that the 1st attack just stopped for lack of movement and had to engage, but I'm thinking now that the AI had targeted the ships in the first attack, and had targeted the base in the second, and the presence of ships at the base during the attack was not an event that was noticed by the AI.

That's why I was "shocked" when they spray-painted insulting graffiti on my ships and then ran away without a scratch. You don't suppose they can outrun Laser V's, do you?   Aww, heck, it was probably a Super Ability ... do the Yor have Super Warrior first shot?

Edited - I just thought of a 3rd possibility, that the ships were also destroyed and my screen hadn't updated (even though I made sure the base icon was gone and the ships were not) ... the ships icon was still there and I could click on it for info. That thought occurs because I have noticed the drop-down "planetary improvements completed" icons on the right side of my screen not showing single completed improvements until the following turn, although it seems to stay current when there is more than one, and doesn't appear to happen for completed ship construction icons at all. Sometimes Pirate ships and once in a while a Drengin ship suddenly magically appear well inside sensor range even when I have the Eyes of the Universe sendor upgrade. That only seems to happen close to the edge of the map, though. Just another guess.

Until you research the appropiate techs the starbase will be of no use for to in that regard. You have to have installed modules on the SB with the "Ship Assist" tag. A standard SB does nothing but increase you influence, just putting weapons on the SB is exactly that, weapons for the base. Not till you add the ship assist modules will you get benefit for surrounding ships.



No, that is the Arceans, unless you have created a custom Yor race and given them that ability.



There are some graphical glitches with the latest build of beta's for DA. What version are you using as it seems this would be the most likely cause of what has happened. Even at times when there is heavy load on your GPU you can get lag like that. In my gigantic, abundant everything games in DA i get some really serious lag in the latter stages of the game, though there can be 900 planets and literally 1000's of ships. But it has happened at other times, and i have 2gb ram and a 7600gt graphics card.

Also i think, think, that with the new beta's there is some trouble on older cards.....not sure where i read this though so don't take my word as gospel on that.

Yes, I know about Starbase Defenses. I had that researched, and I had modules installed (remember the constructor enroute to upgrade it?) otherwise why would I expect any benefit from the starbase? I should have mentioned it more explicitly.

Ref: a different reply to a post in bug reports, I also noticed that the Starbase Defenses research option lists the Beam Interceptor (along with Energy Grid and Missile Defender) as being available modules to install on a military starbase after researching Starbase Defenses, but only the Energy Grid and Missile Defender modules are made available for military starbases immediately after researching Starbase Defenses; it is made available after you install the Battle Stations 1 module (at considerable additional expense). After the Battle Stations 1 module is installed, then the Beam Interceptor becomes available, however that seems to be a glitch also, since it is listed with the other two Starbase Defenses (under New Starbase Modules on the Research Screen when Starbase Defenses is selected). The other two modules listed there are available without having to install (and pay additional fee for) the Battle Stations 1 module.

It would be nice to know if you, or anyone else, has also seen this. What I did was research the Starbase Defenses, build several constructors, and send them out to build a military starbase and upgrade it ... and discovered the Starbase Defenses weren't all available, only the mass driver and missile defenses. So I happened to install the Battle Stations 1 module in place of the Beam Interceptor defense, and lo and behold the Beam Interceptor defense then became available for my next constructor to install. If you have time, could you give it a try? I'm hoping it isn't just my new AMD 6000+ cpu on a fancy new mobo with an nvidia7950gt pci-e 512mb video card that's somehow not able to keep up. Thanks for your assistance and for taking time to reply.   

In my opinion, starbases are only eye candy. They have no strategic importance in the game since you can simply ignore them, invade the planet first then they just dissapear. So why waist time building them? It,s cheaper and easier to just increase the shiels on your ships.

Yes and thats a shame, Starbases should have a ZONE OF CONTROL and be able to fire at passing enemy ships 1 hex out, I also think they should have upgrades that can increase the firing range, esp. for missles, AI bases with long-range missles would force you to build up missle defense before incursions, though each armed missle should have an expensive cost and a (reload downtime). I would only let the military starbases have the longer-range stuff. In fact only the military bases should have the zone of control and that would allow you to protect your best planets with them, though the costs for the best upgrades should be high to prevent overuse.

Thats a good point ... have you ever read any sci-fi space military books? Those ideas are schemed-out in several I've read. The one series by David Weber, the "Honor Harrington" series (female military genius that advances to the top on pure ability, I would die for her ) has military starbases. If I remember from the books correctly, they took a long time to build, they had all the latest gadgets, and lots and lots of heavy defenses. No space-cadet beam interceptors, just Armor and Point Defense, and all weapons had to eventually penetrate the armor, it could not be bypassed (doh- obviously). Heavy beams at extremely close range had more effect against the armor, but of course when you got close the heavy beams from the base would eat your lunch unless you had tons and tons of armor on your ships.

The bases did not have better weapons than the capital ships. They were the same as generally available in larger ships of the fleet. Their main value was you couldn't ignore them, you had to fight them, because they were strategically placed where you would be under constant attack if you tried to get near the planet or wormhole junction they protected. That made sense, since the space weapons in a lot of military sci-fi, especially the missiles, have much longer range than a can of spray paint.

I posted a similar request a while ago where I proposed that all ships and starbases should have ranged weapons so that you could attack enemies "X" distance from your ship depending on the range of your weapons. I think that this would be great.

I beleive that all the neat new stuff were asking for is going to be part of the new game " Solar Empire,,," that way they get to charge us some more money for basically the same game with improvements in ship battles and invasions.

Sins is an entirely different game made by entirely different developers (Ironclad).

The blurb on this site makes it sound very similar to this game but with many of the things that users have been requesting you to add to this game.

Is it not a turn based game as well? Did Stardock have no input into the design cat all? What makes it unique?

This might be a possible compromise solution ... what do y'all think of this? Instead of asking for range on weapons to be increased and/or fine-tuned in any way, with all the headaches that would create for the programmers; perhaps the AI routines that check the starbase zone of influence (ship defense assist, etc) could be slightly modified to force the AI to confront/attack any military starbase first when the ship(s) entered it's zone of control, period, and before moving on to attack anything else in the zone, unless perhaps an enemy ship was closer, or if a fleet was parked on the base itself.

Then a scenario might play out more realistically, with a military starbase being able to provide zone defense by being a hostility magnet (and perform a useful function without being a useless drain on resources to use at all) ... so there would no longer be any goofy scenarios where a military starbase 1 move point away from a planet just sat there and used it's lazers (if it had any) to make popcorn for the crew to eat while they watch their home planet get taken by a single lousy transport ...

Any thoughts?

It is an RTS game, Gal Civ is a turn based game
It has superior graphics
You can individually command your fleets and ships
Although it has similarities with gal civ 2, it is an rts and completely different

On subject though, when you have all the starbase line maxed out, and all the ship weapons maxed out, you can get at maximum i think 48 ship attack assist and 9 ship defence assist, so build like 4 of those starbases, build tiny hull ships with 1 attack and one defence, and they will take full benefit of this meaning that they have 192 attack spread equally over each weapon type, and 36 defence spread equally over each defence type. This will take lots of investment, and will only really be constructable on large+ galaxies, otherwise it would take too long, but once it gets going its a killer for your military rating .

I once saw a screenshot of 16 of these military bases, took hundreds of constructors to build them, but with each ship costing 100bc production wise, they had like 750 attack and 140 defence per ship, which meant when they had 100 of these tiny hull fighters with 1 attack and 1 defence, they became monsters with ship assist and military rating went flying.

This is annoying to start up though as to buy that many military bases means lots of planets building constructors, which will leave your military open, as less planets building ships, and although your military rating will be high at the end, it just takes one AI to call your bluff and attack you

(I prefer Spin control center:D)

Thats very similar to what I was trying to do early-on in a recent 'challenging' game ... but the Yor AI zoomed in with faster ships, destroyed the base, and left the ships sitting there ... great minds think alike, as usual. Not to belabor the fact, but what would be the use even noticing military starbases if everything were geared for "colony rush/super ability/this is what worked for the first 100 people who started playing x number of years ago" ... ? Such a great game so far! I'd hate to think it couldn't live up to it's potential and would get stuck at "age 13" forever ...   

If you could build the starbase right over the planet, that would be helpful, I still would like to see a pod to give you a zone of control shot at passing ships, maybe just half att or slow missles, something to make the military bases a little better. The idea that bases attract ships would be hard to enforce on human players. As it is the cost to have them in the late game just doesnt== valueable.

give emphasis on borderline conflicts, and defence networks plzor

Yes, but not if no-one was allowed to attack a planet (or anything in orbit around it) until the military presence (the military starbase) was eliminated first.

Also, further along this line of thought ... should transports or other civvie ships like constructors be denied entry to a enemy military starbase zone of control? Should they be made to wait outside the enemy military zone until the fighting is over?

Or would it be enough to just not allow any attacks on planets in a enemy military zone of control, and let the transports park in a "far out orbit" a little closer to the planet so they can jump on it without being forced to wait (as would actually be the case in a real space invasion scenario?).

It still looks like to me, ignorant as I am, that these kinds of adjustments would be a lot easier than re-vamping the weapons system on the programming side and, if done right, would satisfy my taste for realism and real strategy.

  The whole ability to build a military starbase in someones territory without starting a war in the first place seems odd doesnt it? I like the idea that zone of control would prevent other civs starbases being built in the zone. That way starbases help you establish space.   

It would be the same as China setting up a millitary base in New York. Just could not happen without a war.

Another idea that would give emphasis to SB presence/play would be if you were allowed to build 4 of EACH TYPE of SB in a sector.

It has always bothered me that you could make the investment to max out a system's production/research potential with 20+ Econ SBs, but to build defenses for this economic powerhouse, you had to sacrifice some of the potential value.

Possibly this could be limited by only allowing the extra bases in Home Systems.

drrider

Those are all neat ideas , but why not fix the real problem and make millitary starbases do what they are suppose to do in the first place, defend the area! Not just wait around in case a ship feels like attacking them.

Exactly, that goes back to my first post, military starbases need to fire at their surrounding radius, they are the only ranged unit, imo.

That would be a great improvement.

I too think that would be a huge improvement. Midway through the game when you have spent untold resources and time in a maxed out starbase, only to be taken out by a few very heavyly armed warships is kind of a joke. I very rarley build starbases anymore just for that fact. I can build ships that can move and attack at will.