Why do Starbase Attack/Defense Modules Suck?

Starbases play by the same rules, but they max out much, much lower.  Endgame, you can kill off a fully upgraded starbase with a tiny hull ship (I've done it) without even having weapons bonuses.  Midgame, a high tech small or a mid tech medium will do the job as easily.

They also take plenty of constructors, which winds up costing you more than it would take to simply build a fleet in the first place, in both BC and time.

So, yes, they're fairly useless (in terms of attack/defense).

You seem to be unaware of how attack actually works.  Your 5 point defense versus the enemy's 16 missile attack is not going to be very effective at all; almost regardless of how many enemy ships there are or how low their individual attack is.  It's worth noting that each weapon fires individually in DA and TA, so you might actually not take any damage the first hit or three, but the fact that defenses are depreciated as the defenses take damage on a per-round basis pretty much makes up for that and allows us to simplify things, at least for your scenario.

You're probably looking at on average 7 damage taken per round, and may even be higher than that, so in 6-8 rounds you're dead-during which time you pump out an average of 25-35 damage, which is not only spread out between the rounds, but has not been modified by the enemy's defenses.  The reason I haven't done that is you imply that you have missiles, but don't specify what the enemy has for defenses.

So if the enemy's using medium or larger hulls, which to achieve 100+ hp it would seem likely they are, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if you failed to destroy any of them.

I may be wrong, but I seem to remember there being an option to show all battles as fleet battles.  You might have to disable the "show fleet battles only when both sides are fleets" thing as well, though.

This situation is a tad different if you're using the TA Thalan tech tree and have manged to keep Hyperion Starbases to yourself. I play long games, and when you add in the (wonderfully) slowed progress down weapon tech branches, I find using constructors to add attack and defense modules to resource mines can be very handy.

But then I almost always have a military resource mine or two in the mix, and those bonuses do help starbase defense even if it does nothing for their attack modules. In a recent game, I had starbases nearing 100 in all three defense categories. With little more than Mark II battlestations, they ate somewhat scary-looking fleets like a little snack.

Still, that seems to be an exception that proves the rule jujumbura is discovering. I wasn't around in the GC2 beta, but I gathered from some reading that starbases started out as rather overpowered. That's part of where the 4-per-sector limit arose, IIRC. A long while ago, I decided to stop "wasting" constructors on adding combat modules to econ or influence bases. If I wasn't hung up on playing Thalans and running TA, I think I'd rarely, if ever, add a combat module to any station--but I'd also have to do more work to put a defense fleet in easy range of every mine.

Towards the middle of the game star base weapons and defences do tend to be wastes. I always use fleets for protection, but i will add at least the basic offenses just so a stray defender can't take out a star base, that would anger me. If I lose track and send an extra constructor I'll let it add to the star base defences. Of course a lot also depends on how close to hostile territory the base is.

I'm not entirely sure about this, BUT since star bases are treated the same as ships for purposes of battles, if you have a fleet stacked on the base to protect it but the base itself is more powerful, the attacking fleet will figth the star base and not the fleet. When you attack any stacked ships / fleets you always attack the strongest first. So watch how strong you make those bases other wise you'll have a fleet wondering where the star base went.  

IMHO it's almost easier to rebuild a starbase if it does get destroyed.  You might need five or six constructors, but it's easy to spend 3 times that and still lose the startbase in battle if you actually build defenses.  Depends on how thorough you are too.  If you build every attack and every defense on the base it takes a lot of constructors.  If you got a few starbase techs and just specialized against what the closest enemy attack and defense types are it might be alright

IMO starbases were intentionally designed to not be able to look after themselves from mid-game on. It would be too easy to rush certain techs and make completely unbeatable bases.

I've seen a maxed out Thalan base tank the entire Terran navy over about 10 turns without taking much damage. Even their heaviest fleets couldn't hurt the thing. In those few turns, that base killed more ships than the rest of my navy did the rest of the game.

That was a special case - I had higher tech, and the time to build the thing all the way up, along with several maxed out military resources (including the one being attacked) and plenty of weapon-enhancing bonuses, anomalies, etc. Still, when one unit of your navy is effectively unbeatable it makes the game far too easy. IMHO it's far better to force you to defend it with ships - it's a balance issue.

The real problem is that the AI relies entirely on these defenses, and players know they suck.

That means the AI squanders it's time and energy, which is really the key to winning the game. (using your time and resouces effectively)

In TA, it isn't as bad because of the slower weapons techs, but it's still there.  To me the slower techs have just flattened out the game, and made it harder for the player since we don't get the AIs bonuses.

According to the devs ther're intentionally weak, but I find this a weak arguement.  If they're not supposed to work, then why use them?  Why program the AI to depend on them?

Simply put, they should be removed from the game, and the AI should be programed to defend it's key starbases.  Until then, we're stuck having to play maso and higher for a decent game because the AI is so bad in this aspect. 

Or, perhaps resource bases shouldn't provide such huge bonuses, and thus they wouldn't be important.  That seems the devs way out of problems like this in TA.

Considering the fact that starbases take only 5bc per turn to maintain, it's not surprising that the fortifications you can build on them won't be enough to take on a determined and well-equipped enemy fleet.

In my opinion, the starbase technologies could stand to be beefed up a little and the research time increased to be consistent with the increased resaerch time for weapons tech.  Or, the maintenance cost for starbases should be 5bc base, plus more depending on how much fortification is added, in which case as your starships become more powerful than your starbases, it makes much more sense to use fleets to defend your key assets rather than investing in obsolete starbase modules.

Hi!

C) Non-updated combat modules regarding changes in combat rules. In DL, where ships attacked separately, an upgraded SB was quite a formidable fort, at least until the late game, when each huge hulls' attack increased to several hundred points. Until then it was worth fortifying them. With the DA combat changes (all ships attack together), it simply isn't worth the investment. You put on a SB just the "production" modules and defend them with your fleets.

BR,  Iztok

Thanks, Iztok. I knew there was an important bit of update history I was forgetting.

In 1.96 and 2.0, I haven't seen as much "waste" of constructors by the computer players armoring up bases. They seem to have switched to some token defenses so toss-off ships can't just come by & waste 'em. But maybe that's an artifact of the tech cost changes and my play style. I definitely haven't seen better use of fleets to defend their bases, or to attack mine. But I still want the things in GC3, hopefully with better code for the computer players to come closer to using them like I do. The full range of starbases really helps add some "landscaping" to the otherwise fairly spare maps of GC2.

I think fundamental 'revamp' for starbases is to make a decision about just how much space a starbase has on it and building modules with that space in mind - to my mind a starbase should be at least twice the size of your largest hull, with the modules worked to account for that - the difference between a military, civilian, and influence starbase might be the construction sequence, rather than starting it initally then, though I'm not sure if you could translate that over to a Mining starbase.

But if you did that, you could simply upgrade modules with the space requirements in mind.

Jonnan

Well, I doubt we'll see any 'revamp' here at the tail end of GC2. But for GC3, I'd love to get into a wrangle with you on this. I know balance is a problem for any approach to starbases, but IMO there is just no good other reason to have *any* limit on starbase size. If you've got new tech and a spare constructor, stick it on. Maybe you need to spend a few BC for the job, but it isn't like a starbase is a mobile hull, or even a fortress on a specific piece of land. It's in *space*. Spacious space.

But that attitude's doubtless a corrollary to my hope that GC2 will support entirely space-based populations and production facilities. If I ever start puttering seriously at my own GalCiv mods (or helping a team), it will be for an Iain M. Banks' Culture thing, and you can't do that without being able to make planets something the primitives mess with.

In many other games you can mod things like these, e.g. doubling the effect of starbase defences. Is that possible in GC2?

Yes, you can fully mod all the stats and related technologies of starbases in GalCiv2.

Ok then, somebody must have been tempted to do a "Balance mod" or something like that. Is there such a thing?

There are probably several-have you checked the library?  I don't know that any of them address starbase modules, though, and one of the difficulties is to make starbase attack/defense useful late game while not being overpowered early game.  (This is one reason, among many, why I personally haven't made one.  Specifically, it would probably require reassigning the modules to other techs, some of which do not exist yet, while further branching out the fortification tree, at a minimum.)

Try my AsaRaceMod

I tried to issue that, it would be nice to have feedback on that.

MrKorx, that mod looks interesting, but it doesn't seem to address balance issues in general, nor starbase defense issues. Still, I've downloaded it and will try it out, eventually. Theres a definite limit to how much time I can spend playing, so don't expect much feedback (sorry).

I checked out the mod list, and it only seems to have one serious attempt at producing a balance mod, which is outdated now. Interesting. Civ4 has several large mods og high quality, some of which are designed to address balance issues (but a much larger community). SE5 has several mods including a balance mod, which has lived pretty much since the game went into beta test.

Perhaps this is simply an expression that GC2 is percieved to be much better balanced than SE5, perhaps it is a question of the size of the fanbase. I certainly don't have the time to do a mod, nor do I have the required knowledge of how the game plays.