Starbases: how to use them?

[Kinjiru]

Hee Hee... Last night I loaded up a save game from a couple nights ago. Went along fine for a while, then got into a long war with the Yor. We went about pillaging each other and generally depleting each others resources. I was pretty sure this meant I was not going to to win the game since during this war the Arcs kept steadily progressing in all areas.

Then I noticed these two planets off in the far corner that I had settled long ago and forgotten about. And since I turned off notification for most everything (can't be distracted from the war you know!), I had no idea what was there.

So I click on over and what do I find? About 40 constructors all waiting for me. Well, clickety-click, there we go, six fleets of seven constuctors each. Put them on a course for the rear of the Yor empire. When they got there I instantly had three Yor sectors with three culture filled starbases (and a little defense of course). Rush some ships over to defend them and in a few turns (okay more like 15) those sectors have defected to me!

War... over....

[sacjim]

I think a couple of the cultural bonuses for starbases should also give a small econ bonus to planets in the sector

off the top of my head, i think there's a shopping center, and a waterslide park that give big culture bonuses. Seems like those should affect your economy, since it's basically tourism.

[BlueDEvil]

I much prefer to have morale bonus modules like holiday resort. It is quite difficult to handle large population with the morale dropping so rapidly.

[LDiCesare]

I use star bases for offense/defense. I build them in clusters around the corners of sectors, farthest possible from the enemies, so it is easier to protect all of them with a single ship. In my territory, I boost whatever production and ship offense is available.
But the most useful usage of these beasts is offense: Stack 3 or four constructors, move them in opponent sector, build star base, add +6 to ship attack and smite them. That way you lose little or no ship, can recycle the starbase later into a production/culture base if you like to. These bases make it very easy to attack/defend a given sector.

[Fried-Psitalon]

In a day or two I'll be posting a few screenshots about why Starbases are completely broken in the overpowered direction right now...

Starbase productivity bonuses stack. I have a system that is doing....frightening...things.....per turn.

There are a LOT of starbases with everything up to Massive Scaled Factories there.....

[LDiCesare]

Does the AI use star bases aggressively at high levels? By aggressively, I mean building clusters of starbases between their stars.

[Brizey]

unic:

two things:

1) Did you load an autosave? Might not have been the very last turn.

2) Don't forget that tribute can alter you instantenous economic balance by quite a bit. Did you have a tribute agreement run out?

[eloquence]

Starbases are broken...

I have been stacking 7-8 starbases in populated sectors and I have to agree with Fried that this can get very scary in terms of the production that you can get.

Once the late game hits I can crank out battleships about 1 every 2-3 turns on my populous planets.

I think that there really needs to be some balancing on that. I've only been playing on normal level but it seems like things can get very broken quickly.

[unic]

Originally posted by Brizey
unic:

1) Did you load an autosave? Might not have been the very last turn.

No, and there was a bug... which is now fixed in one of the patches. (Nice to have developers online on IRC - I mentioned the bug, and less than 10 minutes later, got told that it had been fixed so values would be saved correctly now, and would be part of the next update/patch)

/unic