Military Starbases, please help a newbie

There are weapons that can be added to *any* kind of starbase and all they do is to protect the starbase itself. In actuality they don't really do a good job of that and it's far better to keep a top line fleet in the vicinity of (or on top of) a starbase for protection.

These aren't the modules you want. The benefit of military starbases is that you can place starship assist modules that increase the attack and defense of the ships within the influence area of the starbase.

I think I have a chart around here somewhere. You want the the first set of modules and once you have them all they add +54 attack and +9 defense to *any* ship as long as it has at least one point of attack and one point of defense.

Rather than overwhelm you with tecnical data I'll tell you my simple approach to military starbases.

The military starbase can defend itself (when upgrade with contructors to lvl 2 or 3 battlestations+armor,etc) against quite powerful fleets and as well as assisting nearby fleets they can also draw fire away as I've seen the AI fleets go straight for my starbases and rather than hit a juicy fleet they suicided themselves onto my fully armed base. I tend to build a military base near my homeworld and my manufacturing capitals (assuming their on different worlds) and use the area effect as a staging area for my fleets.also they actually speed up your fleets passing through its area of influence and it slows the enemy fleets down as well.

hope this helps...

Thanks for your help!

I built the military starbases early to raise my military level(trying to prevent a decleration of war) and to protect my planets, while I research the necessary technologies to build a useful war ship. As I understand now, the right approach is actually the opposite from what I thought. I first need all those technologies to make military starbases useful.

Now for the list, does a starship needs to have missiles itself, to get a missile bonus from missile bloom, or for example, does a warship with one beamer have also a level 1 missile attack if in range of a friendly starbases with missile bloom module?

Btw, in my last game all starbases were limited to 4 modules. I guess in this environment military starbases are useless anyway.

Off-topic, I tried to design my own ships, but in fact all those 'pre-factured' ships are better= have space for more modules, example: Pre-facture ship has 2 beam and ECM1, if I use the same hull in design mode and the smallest available engine  I can't even add an 2nd beam. By checking the forum I noticed several threats about a bug that let the computer use all designs at highest miniaturization level BUT they claim that was before v2.0. I'm using Arnor 2.04 . Is this the known bug, or what could I have done wrong?

Your ships only need one weapon to benefit from all damage-increasing modules. The damage-type doesn't matter in this case. Same goes for defense.

There are two versions of the UP issue that restricts starbase modules. One is limited for three years, the other has no time limit. If you got the latter one, you may get lucky, and it gets brought up again. In that case, you could try to vote for no limit. If that gets passed, the limitation will be removed.
While starbases loose much of their value, due to the module limit, they still have their uses. Just focus them on what you really want from them: speed-increase, better production or trade, stronger weapons, etc.

Regarding the ship designs: are you absolutely sure that the auto-designed ships have more components than they should? This is pretty easy to verify. Just build one, look at it's details, and then try to make a design with the same components. Also, the auto-designer sometimes uses extras that look like regular components (weapons, engines, etc.), but aren't actually working. They are purely cosmetic. Maybe you are seeing those?

Your ships only need one weapon to benefit from all damage-increasing modules. The damage-type doesn't matter in this case. Same goes for defense.

Cool, thx!

I checked again and found the mistake. I took for granted that a ship needs an engine to travel through space. It seems logical to me, but maybe it's just because I've played Master of Orion for so many years . As I wrote before, I added an engine to my designs while all those pre-factured ships don't have one. Deducting the engine I can build the same ships.

Unfortunately, starbases didn't get much love throughout this game's development and patches. The only new stuff it ever got (if I remember correctly) were a number of sensor modules, the ability to use a constructor to repair a starbase, and a number of new modules for the Twilight expansion. Starbases never really kept up with the times.

From what I understand, the problems with starbases are:
-Starbases have too many modules. It takes too long to assemble them from the ground up.
-Starbases don't defend themselves well in the long run. With end game tech, it is possible to build a huge hull armed with enough guns and defenses to be better than any starbase in a fight, giving it more firepower in all fields, more defenses in all fields, more hit points, and the ability to travel about. On top of that, such ships can join a fleet...
-Starbases have only 1 gun, so they can only make 1 attack per turn. Other ships that have multiple guns (Dark Avatar and Twilight) can make multiple attacks per turn if they don't need to use all their guns to kill a ship. If a ship had 10 guns, each of which that could kill a ship on its own, then it could kill 10 ships. If the same ship needed 2 guns to kill a certain kind of ship, then it could kill 5 of those kinds of ships. Starbases, with their 1 gun, can only kill 1 ship per turn, so any battle with a lot of opposing ships is probably going to take a while to kill.

The only thing going for them is that they can provide a few special advantages not easily duplicated through other means. Its foolish to overlook the advantage of a few maxed out military resources when you have doom rays. I had more than a few maxed out military resources in a recent game, that multiplied the firepower and defenses of my ships by more than 4.

There are also two more problems with stabases: 1. the AI can only use the first 100 modules in the XML-file. Every module after that point, might as well not exist. 2. the AI is unable to use certain types of modules.

The first problem is pretty big, because it affects most of the new modules from TotA. Certain races, like the Drengin and Yor, can't use their racial-specific mining and production-assist modules, among other things, because the AI doesn't recognise their existence.

The second problem isn't that bad, as it only affects the slow-enemy, sensor and Terror Star modules. While this does change the playing field a bit, because the player and AI play essentially by different rules, it isn't nearly as bad as the first problem. I'm still not certain, though, if the AI can use the Starbase Hull Repair Kit module.

In any case, I addressed most of those problems in my mod. The only things I couldn't change, are the parts that are hardcoded (SB only have one weapon, AI can't use certain module types). Even in those cases, however, I tried to reduce the symptoms a little.

Gaunathor, I've read about your mod, sounds very promising. I will try that on one of my next games.

Cheers

Thanks, I hope you like it.

Military starbase is designed for one single purpose, to enhance your own existing starship within its area of influence or reducing the effectiveness of enemy ships, aside from that, it really does nothing. i almost never construct military starbase during my game unless i play as Yor Collection with Super Isolationist ability. Just put up a slow module and see all enemy ships near your military starbase grind to a halt. 1 parsec per turn is pretty sick, it will give you ton of time to mass up before their troops or starships can get to your planet. i usually just go for mining and econ starbase and never bother with military, it just seems to me that mining draws ton of aggro from the AI, while the econ is the second largest aggro generator, so if you get enough of those two, the entire game becomes like a tower defense, they will keep sending their unit to a suicide mission, (assuming you upgraded them, and have proper defenses setup) and you will be safe for quite a long time, but that would have to be built on the assumption that you will piss a lot of them off and you are not very diplomatic with AI.