Advanced weapons, 80hp yet destroyed by a ship with minimum weapons and 20hp
GalCiv3 Forums
As example, within this engagement i always lose my space station....
How is a 7/3 14/3 7/3 with 80hp losing vs a 6/12 0 0 20/24hp????
There are several issues with this:
Putting all of this together, we see that, using weapon systems which are known to exist and are used by playable species in the Galactic Civilizations universe, a station would need to predict a target's location anywhere from 30 seconds to more than 90 years in the future in order to score a hit with beam weapons, with it being probable that the station would need to know the target location several months to several years in advance on average to hit a target 3 tiles distant with a beam weapon, and likely needs considerably better predictive capabilities to hit targets 3 tiles distant with non-beam weapons. Worse, since all known weapon systems available to playable species appear to propagate at no greater than luminal velocities and each turn represents a week of time (at least based on GCII), the maximum range that such a weapon could cover in a single turn is 0.006 real-world parsecs, which would appear to be well under the average dimension of in-game map tiles as such an average dimension would imply that the shortest path from Sol to its nearest neighbor should be on the order of a thousand tiles long.
Beyond those objections, there is no reason to believe that any of the weapons in the Galactic Civilizations universe are effective at even the absolute minimum range suggested by Draginol's post for a 3-tile separation between the station and the target, as all combat in the Galactic Civilizations series has thus far been shown to occur at ranges which can be crossed by beam weapons virtually instantaneously, all of which appear to propagate at the same speed as the game's lasers, and moreover none of the missile or mass driver weapons propagate at a velocity which appears to be any greater than a fraction of the speed of light. This suggests that the weaponry and targeting systems of the Galactic Civilizations universe are not up to the task of engaging targets more than a fraction of a light-second distant.
As far as the subject of whether or not a station should be able to defend itself against minor attacks, I would say yes, and with enough research and construction invested into defenses it should probably be capable of resisting moderate attacking forces, presuming those forces are at a technological and power level similar to that of the station. Thus, if a station takes a cruiser-sized slot of fleet space, I would want a station with 'average' to 'heavy' defensive upgrades to be capable of resisting attacks by cruiser-level opponents at the same technological level, and possibly something a bit more than that if the station's defenses were heavily upgraded (and it might be appropriate for the more militarized stations to be a bit more defensively powerful than the less-militarized stations, such as culture starbases, are). If the station defenses are at much less than that level of competence, then station defenses become pointless as the station is a liability in any fleet engagement and it becomes far better to simply use a local defense fleet to protect the station rather than wasting time and upgrades on the station itself, while if the station defenses are at much more than that level of competence it has too much potential of becoming an unassailable location when the station is part of a decent fleet.
Ok, first I had no idea that distances in tiles were so fluid, if it really mattered to gameplay that would break the game for me but it doesn't really. Second, all combat so far and likely ever to be shown of the GalCiv universe is abstracted, we don't know what range is really involved and that the depictions are anywhere near accurate, just interesting enough to watch on occasion. Third, I love how much thought you've put into this but you are way over thinking it and you missed a few issues. Turns are a week long, so you only need to know how far your target moves in a week and with that and the knowing the speed the target has traveled while under observation is likely the speed it will remain at so extrapolating isn't hard. Fourth, ok, you got me. Missiles are the only reasonable choice for trying to destroy a distant ship. No one will travel in a straight line if they thing that might be shot at with a reasonable chance of being hit and at the distances involved beams would attenuate and projectiles are likely to hit something along the way massive enough to change their course since at those distances something the consistency of cigarette smoke could do it.
I agree on the subject of how effective military starbases with the caveat that if they are not effective the option to militarize a starbase should be removed as it becomes a newbie trap.
While it is true that a station should have hours to days of warning of the approach of hostile vessels detected 3 tiles away, it is not necessarily true that the information gathered is sufficiently useful to engage the vessels upon reaching effective weapon ranges. We know that Galactic Civilizations hyperdrives work by warping space in some way, and perhaps this prevents the collection of sufficiently accurate position and velocity information for use in targeting an approaching vessel - after all, we don't know if the sensor technology within the game is able to distinguish between a ship moving at a speed of 0.1c while warping distances by a factor of 20 and a ship which is moving at a speed of 0.2c while warping distances by a factor of 10, or if we can distinguish either of those ships from one moving at 10 mph and warping distances by a factor of 1.34X10^8. Nor do we know how accurately the map-level sensors can determine the distance and direction to a detected target - for all we can tell from the map, the long-range sensors in the Galactic Civilizations universe may actually have worse angular resolution the closer a target comes to the sensor, as the direction in which a vessel on an adjacent tile can be found is known no more accurately than to within one sixth of a sphere (or perhaps a circle) by looking at the game map, but the direction to a target two tiles distant is known to within about one-twelfth of a sphere (or perhaps a circle), and so on, and based on the information within the game it would not be possible to say with any certainty whether this is a limitation of the in-game representation or a limitation of the sensor or an advantage of warping space for effectively superluminal travel rates, and, assuming that this is a limitation of the sensor or an advantage of hyperdrives, we don't know if it's possible to accurately back out the necessary information based on what the sensors detect, and even if the effective weapon ranges are as low as a few hundred kilometers even small errors in determining the direction to a target can turn shots into clean misses.
We also know that all (or at least almost all) map-level movement is performed while the hyperdrive is engaged, but we do not know how close ships come to planets, stations, and other ships before disengaging the hyperdrive, nor do we know how warped space in the Galactic Civilizations universe interacts with projectiles and electromagnetic radiation (e.g. lasers or radar pulses) attempting to reach a target producing the distortion effect. We don't know if ships with hyperdrives engaged are effectively immune to detection by the kinds of sensors used for combat targeting or if ships are forced to disengage their hyperdrives long before they reach engagement ranges because emissions from targeting radars crossing the spatial distortions generated by active hyperdrives at close to combat ranges hit whatever is inside the distortion with the force of a supernova (though this last is likely not the case). We don't know how quickly ships move from the range at which they disengage hyperdrives to combat ranges, other than that the time period in which this happens is no greater than perhaps a third or a half of the time period represented by 1 move action, or if the ships can make use of their hyperdrives over short (but greater than combat) ranges to screw with targeting. We don't know when evasive maneuvers, spoofing, jamming, or other ways to evade weapons fire becomes effective; possibly ships intent on engaging a target can approach under sufficiently heavy jamming to prevent a target's sensors from providing an adequate firing solution until both sides are well within the effective ranges of the weapon systems under ideal circumstances, perhaps the station's weapons have a lower effective range against the attacker than the attacker's weapons do against the station (not terribly unlikely, as the station is a large and relatively immobile target whereas the attacker is probably smaller and is likely designed for greater maneuverability than the station).
We simply do not know enough about the capabilities of the weapons, the sensors, the ships, and the stations in Galactic Civilizations to judge whether or not a station can make use of its knowledge that a hostile ship is approaching from a point 3 tiles away to prepare a warm welcome for that ship, nor do we know enough about how hyperdrives work (or are used) in Galactic Civilizations to say whether or not real-world sensors could be used to prepare the same warm welcome on final approach to combat ranges. Without knowing this kind of information, we really cannot say whether or not a station that detects an approaching hostile ship has 3 nanoseconds or 3 days to point the guns in the right direction with enough accuracy to hit the approaching vessel, or even whether or not it has the information to do more than put "General Quarters 2 o'clock Tuesday" on the schedule.
Again, love how much thought you put into this but you missed the key bits. Key bit #1, GalCiv sensors are very accurate, you can always find your target with another fleet, there is no uncertainty. Key bit #2 you can always force engagement with an enemy fleet in the same tile so no matter how the hyperdrive distorts space it does not disrupt the function of sensors and everyone has a system that will allow their weapons to engage whether in or out of superluminal velocity. Going back the the point above about abstracted combat, we don't know if space battles in the GalCiv universe is conducted with Newtonian or Relativistic physics because what we see is effectively the highlights not the reality.
If this is a universal position among players it indicates that military SB's need an upgrade from Galciv II. Did people find them useful, honestly? If useful, efficient?
Military starbases, especially highly-upgraded military starbases, could be useful, but the problem was that you had to fight within the area of effect, and so you'd probably spend great sums of money and many turns of planetary production building construction ships to create this one area where you get all these great bonuses and then you'd find that you actually get to make use of those bonuses maybe once or twice in the entire game. The only thing about them which was generally useful was that they could give a speed bonus of a couple of points to ships that started their turn inside the starbase's area of effect, and if I'm not mistaken that speed bonus stacked if multiple starbases all covered the same tile, so you could effectively create jump points where you might get to move an extra 8 moves or something like that the next turn if you planned where you ended your movement correctly, and if you wanted to you might be able to create highways like this so that you could make better use of those factory planets in your empire's heartlands better, rather than continually moving the factories up towards the border while converting the backfield over to lab and purse worlds, and you could make it so that you could relocate fleets relatively quickly from one side of your empire to the other if necessary, but that was about the only long-term benefit the military starbase offered.
Starbase defense modules were never particularly worthwhile in GCII because, all else being equal, would you rather spend a construction ship getting +5 beam attack on your starbase or +10% research to every planet in its area of effect? My fleets typically provide adequate defense for my starbases, and if they don't, the defensive modules aren't likely to make that much of a difference. Maybe Battle Stations I or a couple of the basic weapon modules early on to repel minor aggression, but aside from that, why bother? They cost planetary production turns, money to pay for the military production or the rush purchase of the ships, maybe extra time if you're building the construction ships far from the station, more money for several of the combat modules, and all for something that should never see any significant amount of combat. The time and money spent on combat upgrades for starbases would normally be better spent on building a fleet or two of ships to defend that starbase; after all, the fleet is at least as effective and can be relocated when the threat passes or if needed elsewhere. The resources invested in the starbase modules are stuck wherever the starbase is, and just make the starbase more expensive to replace if it's lost. On top of that, a lot of the starbase defenses were on an entirely separate branch of the tech tree from ship weapons and ship defenses, and since starbases cannot really defend planets and transports or attack enemy fleets, that branch of the tech tree was more of a luxury for when you have nothing better to do than a practical line of research. Why bother researching Starbase Fortification when fleets were better defenses and isolated starbases were doomed anyways? Especially when in order to get the full benefits of the line of research you needed something like 20 construction ships to install everything in the first place. With ships, you can install only the best stuff, but with starbases you have to install everything, and even worse is that some of it's restricted to being installed in the order you unlocked it - don't worry, boys, I'm sure that Battle Stations I with its 1/1/1 0/0/0 attack and defense bonuses will be so effective against modern cruisers with their 25/15/20 20/20/18 attack and defense scores, and I'm sure it's worth installing it before we get around to mounting the Starbase Invulnerability Field Generator with its 16/16/16 defense rating or the Starbase Heavy Blaster Array with its 10/0/0 attack rating (the second two modules are made up, or if they're real modules, their statistics are made up).
If you want to hit it, particularly if you want to hit it at extreme range, you need to know its course and speed with a lot of accuracy, especially if the target is moving quickly or if a lot of time elapses between firing the weapon and the potential time when your weapon's projectile can strike the target. A week is also a lot of time in which you can change course if you so desired, and even if you aren't going out of your way to conceal your end destination, you don't need to follow the baseline course exactly.
Beyond that, if you noticed, the speed numbers that I gave previously all have an effective travel speed of twice the speed of light; that was part of the point of the examples. You might know the effective map-level speed, but you don't necessarily know what this translates into when they enter the station's firing range and disengage the hyperdrive, and the velocity at which the ships are moving relative to the station when they enter the station's effective range is what is important if the station's weapons are to hit them, whereas the apparent strategic level speed is useful only for knowing roughly when the ships will get here. We don't even know whether or not ships with active hyperdrives need to have velocities aligned with the direction of propagation of the spatial distortion created by the hyperdrive or if Galactic Civlizations sensors can tell where within the spatial distortion a ship can be found, or if ships have to be in certain positions relative to the spatial distortion their hyperdrives create. If the distortion is a sphere 200 miles in diameter and the ship can be found anywhere inside of that, the distortion is still well under the minimum dimension of a map tile so there's plenty of space for a lot of fleets, and even knowing the exact path and speed of the distortion will only get your weapons fire within maybe 100 miles of the ship creating it if you cannot figure out where within the distortion the ship happens to be.
The battle space might possibly be within a spatial distortion, with the effect that the battle as a unit moves at superluminal velocities, but the ships engaged are not moving at superluminal velocities, or even high fractions of the speed of light, relative to one another, as beam weapons propagate between ships significantly more rapidly than the ships themselves move. However, I would judge it unlikely that the battles take place within massive spatial distortions as the Fleet Warp Bubbles technology suggests that ships in a fleet typically generate their own distortions rather than there being one giant distortion containing the full fleet. More likely, both fleets disengage their hyperdrives before engaging in battle; presumably, since fleets are always capable of forcing battle if they attempt to occupy the same map tile, there is some means of making it too dangerous to keep the hyperdrive engaged and run away (and some justification for a device capable of disrupting the function of hyperdrives enough to force a battle exists given that there is a station module in GCII that can reduce the speed of hostile ships within the entire area of effect of the station; it's not too hard to imagine that warships might carry a version of that device with a more localized effect that more completely disrupts hyperdrive function, which is usable as long as the ships can come sufficiently close to the target), or perhaps all the navies in the game mandate that their officers always accept battle when offered, regardless of the matchup, or perhaps it's just a restriction of the game engine to prevent the players from having to waste time running down every last fighter and surround it with fleets on every adjacent tile to force a battle. And if the justification for the ability to always force a battle with a fleet that can reach a tile containing another player's fleet is that there's a device that disrupts hyperdrives, all that the sensors need to do is get a ship close enough to use the device. Depending on just how close this hypothetical device needs to be to function is not clear, of course, but the upper bound on how good the map-level sensors are at pinpointing targets is the same as it was from just looking at the map - the sensors need to be able to locate the target to within 1 map tile. If the map level sensors can do more than that, we cannot tell. It's entirely possible for the ships to have a separate sensor suite for closing with targets and engaging in combat than the sensor suite which is used for collecting map-level information; it may even be likely, as to the best of my knowledge adding more sensor components has no effect on combat performance despite presumably making it possible to burn through jamming more easily if the sensor components added were the same components used for targeting.
@Joeball123 Yup, pretty much. We don't know the specifics of how battle is forced just that it works and ships are fairly easily found. About the efficacy of military starbases especially given their cost, I also agree that they have historically been poor choices.
I've been arguing that they should either be boosted to be worth while or removed. What I think will happen if this choice for game design is forced is that they will be removed because military starbases would have to get a new capability to be worth while or perhaps the entire starbase system will need to be revamped. Personally I don't see why starbase modules aren't treated like buildings on planets, when the next level is unlocked buildings just upgrade, for starbase modules you need another constructor. This makes little sense to me and really just forces constructor spam that is tedious and boring, slows down the game and increases micromanagement. I won't have a problem with upgrading those modules costing money or production from the supporting planets, or production for economic and money for starbases that don't have planets within their area fo influence. And if Stardock doesn't do this a modder likely will.
36/54 0/0 0/0 150 HP 3 Corvettes Vs 5/13 5/3 5/3 80 HP starbase - Destroyed base no damage to attacking ships.
Re-run same attack but add 6 Torpedo Boats 0/19 13/17 0/15 hp each to defend the starbase and two lights go away but the full attacking fleet is eliminated, base saved.
I'm not sure if you're talking about starbase weapons or military starbases - if you're referring to the latter, I've found them to be quite useful. A ship moving in the AoE of 3 starbases with Stellar Wake Generators (and each starbase has a 9-hex AoE) gets 8 times its ordinary movement, whereas enemy ships have their movement reduced to about 1/3 their base value. Give each of those starbases 3 of the general weapon & defense boost modules, and a tiny fighter with one basic missile, gun, and beam weapon will be getting +12 to all weapons and defenses.
If you have a lot of production, you can build a line of them 2 layers deep, giving ships 32 times their base movement, while crippling the speed of any approaching foe. Not bad.
Hah -- I love the outright geekiness in this thread 
Most of your numbers are correct, but I'm sure weaponry has kept pace with the tech. Probably every beam/cannon weapon also exploits its own distortion field to eliminate the Newtonian space, or some similar handwaving argument to make Stardock's abstractions work. Hexes scale linearly in ship components, and So Shall It Be. We suspend our disbelief.
I'll note that even the venerable Star Trek (extended) universe largely fudged the details of warp-speed combat. None of the movies or TV episodes ever had the time, budget, or geekiness to officially address any such issues (read: they had to pander down to the average Techie's limited understanding, which rules out math anything). Novel authors were given license to make up their own details, which became quasi-canonical (but most of them just ducked the issue). Very few of the authors-of-novels ever explicitly incorporated each others' ideas into their own, and there was almost no return-pollination of ideas from novels being brought back into later ST canon.
Oddly, every other Star Trek combat I've seen or read has been sub-light, and at ranges close enough that speed-of-light sufficed to be instantaneous. We geeks might be sure that they're not limited to c, but try explaining that to a movie crowd.
-- just nod and accept it. A bad/good guy sacrifices/redeems himself to take it out (or in -- waaaay in) with a singularity grenade, yup yup. (Gee, J. J. Abrams could recycle that idea in a Star Trek movie, or something.) They never actually fire it, so we have no data about its combat performance.The bottom line seems to be: We'll Believe Anything 
and pay money for more of it! It helps if there's some math credibility under it, but we can accept almost any mechanism as long as it allows for good storytelling (or game play). Stardock's game abstractions don't have to make sense in terms of real math. They haven't even fully balanced them for game play, which is hard enough.
The one abstraction that really irritates me is that, in Space Empires tactical combat, there is zero penalty for shooting out of a planet's gravity well, and zero benefit for shooting into it. It bothers the human because we're always the one shooting inward ...
Since the advent of diplomacy, I have not had to fire a single shot to win. Now I just "Peace" everyone to death & take over with culture. But I now have the itch to go and blow the **** out of someone. That being said, I see SB as the largest things in space besides planets, suns & moons. What have they got for power sources, 2 AAA batteries? You should be able to beef them up to a point where they could stand up with almost anything (at least for a little while). A small fighter is about he size of an ant to a basketball in comparison and should be no match for even a poorly defended SB. Just my opinion but, with the ability to pack the power of at least a dozen Titan sized ships in itself for defense, it should be the baddest thing in space (eventually). I'm not saying plop it down and get out of the way. I wouldn't mind throwing the resources at it to make it that way. 1 small ship should have to pound on even the most basic SB for several turns to do damage just on sheer size alone. I'm small and fast, but if someone larger than me gets one decent shot in, I'm toast. So it should be with SB's. Even Luke had the force, mf & several squads of attack fighter backing him up before he was able to take out a SB. USE THE FORCE LUKE
I'm not sure if you're talking about starbase weapons or military starbases - if you're referring to the latter, I've found them to be quite useful. A ship moving in the AoE of 3 starbases with Stellar Wake Generators (and each starbase has a 9-hex AoE) gets 8 times its ordinary movement, whereas enemy ships have their movement reduced to about 1/3 their base value. Give each of those starbases 3 of the general weapon & defense boost modules, and a tiny fighter with one basic missile, gun, and beam weapon will be getting +12 to all weapons and defenses.
If you have a lot of production, you can build a line of them 2 layers deep, giving ships 32 times their base movement, while crippling the speed of any approaching foe. Not bad.
I'll have to check those out. Since the AI is still a placeholder I've been mostly been on offense against them so I haven't done much with defenses other than putting a ship on all of my planets and shipyards to make the AI work for them. I've been going on other people reports that military starbases just get killed when not protected by a fleet. However I do vaguely remember they weren't that great in 2 either.
In GC 2, a starbase could be usefully upgraded to stand off small single ships (or maybe small fleets if you researched the techs and had lots of constructors) but by mid-to-late game you had better have a covering fleet or put the base a long way from enemies. I would be satisfied it GC3 opted for the same model, but my experience so far bears out what everyone else is saying. Starbases, no matter how upgraded, are worthless when attacked. I have had ships take damage when attacking a defended shipyard, so that's something.
I'll agree that we can work with pretty much any set of hand-waving rules for how the 'physics' of GC3 starflight and combat works. Every science-fiction author I've read posits combat must be sublight except for David Weber's Honor Harrington tales. You can fight at superlight speeds... but your shields don't work, so it is pretty much suicide to try it.
Military star bases are command centers for fleet operations, maintenance and repair. They are home to a local "fleet" which IRL, unlike the wide definition used in GalCivIII, refers to a formidable collection of warships. Like most prepared stationary fortifications the military SB can be simply avoided, but it means leaving a fortified position behind you to serve Fleet Ops for the enemy, as well as leaving whatever the base protected in enemy hands. A fully developed SB at equal tech level to attacking ships should be like taking on Gibraltar (Spain), or Fort McHenry in Maryland (USA): it should not be easy.
Attack/Defense ratings need to work according to the numbers -- whatever they are. The entire combat system is currently being worked on according to the weekly video update. I presume the devs will have a fully functional system up and running that will address most of our concerns. Mine are simply that, as it stands now, there doesn't seem to be a workable combat system, so whatever they get working will be a decent improvement.
I don't think it's just SBs that are an issue. I had a small ship A: 0/8/0 D: 12/0/0 20HP, that went up against the same hull A: 8/0/0 D: 12/0/0 24HP. I would have expected to do some damage to them even though I might lose. So, I'm thinking the place holder is all or nothing on a per ship basis. In the next fight with the surviving enemy ship I had two of mine and a found "lost" Defender (IIRC) with 12/12 slug thrower/armor. Enemy destroyed; the Defender destroyed; the two small ships undamaged.
Not conclusive, by any means, but it looks consistent over a couple more fights.
Edit: Next fight my A: 0/12/0 D: 0/0/0 20HP took out a 8/12 24HP beamer mentioned above and took 15 Hits... so much for that theory...
First off let me say my Nerd is not strong enough to run numbers against you all.
That being said this is a game and some suspension of belief is required. While I don't want to see complete wackiness be the rule of the day, I also don't want a draconian vision of reality to rule.
My take is Starbases should not be rickrolled by the first small or medium hull ship that rolls in, even bases like cultural or mining should at least take a squad of ships to take down. And actual military starbases should require a fleet of medium to capitals to take out. That's my view on this argument. While I can completely respect the views and desires of those who want to see tin can bases that require a fleet for defense. The amount of resources and logistics it takes to build these structures would seem to warrant a bit of a shell and toughness to them.
If you want to come by and steal an opponents elerium mine great. But you should have to dedicate a bit more than a couple corvettes to do it. Especially if the owner has taken the time to actually put weapons and defenses in place.
Otherwise lets drop all the modules and constructors to build up these beasts and just make them a single constructor to build and they upgrade automatically when the appropriate tech is researched.
I didn't think of that you are asking a minimum firing distance of Neptune to the sun to 55.6 lightyears . this adjustment is different between inside and between solar systems. That as far as detecting it would make sense to be able to detect this. Even though combat is much closer perhaps less than 1,000 or 10,000 miles. This range is a lot more than 100 mile battle fronts of today. I agree a star base should be reasonably defended for it's level of technology, but firing should not be the distance of Neptune to the sun. I don't think you should be able to fire from three parsects away. As far as realism it is really up to the devas to decide this.
In the last developer's session Paul was asked about this issue and I think he misunderstood the question. His suggestion was to add weapons and defensive modules to the base and put ships into the station for defense. Paul, weapons and defenses added to a starbase don't seem to do any good; that's the problem. No matter how many weapons/defenses modules you pack onto a starbase; it will be easily destroyed by a few weak ships. Adding escorts does help, but not much. So defending a base at all is a total waste of resources because the base weapons and defenses do nothing when attacked.
I'd like to be able to protect my starbases from weak raiding forces, especially in the early game. Did that a lot in GC2 and sometimes it can be a good tactic to soak up a small force or two by putting, as it were, bait in the trap. In GC3 this isn't do-able; only a nearby naval squadron can save a base.
Classic military theory is that a defended point allows you to mass your mobile forces for a decisive engagement. In GC3 - at the moment - there can be no fortified points, no matter how many constructors you spend.
As far as making military starbases and adding modules to help ships in the region, I can say I never bother with this; I think it is more efficient to get better techs for ships and use those superior mobile forces to win.
Dude, putting more ships in the Starbase IS the answer. They can only defend starbases to make them safe from other fleets and no one likes OP starbases either. More needs to be known about firing order too.
DARCA. 
My impression was that in the last dev stream Paul was referring to the power of the star base after the game has been properly balanced. I believe they have been clear that weapon and defensive power is not properly balanced at this point.
What I heard was that the star base, fully defended would be formidable but not so formidable it could hold off a decent fleet without ships being part of the defense
Darca, if the weapons and defenses for a starbase are not meant to ever be useful then I think the devs should take them out of the game. Right now they are a waste of good constructors.
Franco, that's all I want.
I'm pretty sure it is a balancing question or some piece of code not implemented yet; I was just pointing out that the question was misunderstood.
Don't wait Franco, that's what early access is all about, they have asked for feedback and ideas and i bet you have good ones 
AMEN! make them really mean something or get rid of them.
I don't see much point for this resistance to making starbases better defended. Like your typical fortress, a well fortified starbases is trap of sorts (for the player building them). Fleets can fly around them and they can't do much to defend your planets (and you are temped to think they are good for defense). Starbases can't directly harm fleets unless those fleets attack the starbase first. Even if you could make starbases that could survive dozens of fleets, that fact alone wouldn't defend your planets and your ships. You can still take planets and conquer a civilization without destroying a single starbase. So I ask, is there any situation where a well fortified starbase is something that will break the game?
Lets not forget that there are reasons why you build starbases. Military starbases boosts ships, economic boosts planets, influence boosts influence, etc. All those starbases do something useful, and without those features, there is no point in building starbases let alone fortifying them. Without those, the starbase might as well be ignored.
In GalCiv 2, it had got so inconvenient to add defensive modules to starbases that using fleets to defend them became the only option worth considering. You had several times the modules for defense than you had modules to make the starbases useful (like mining or economic bonuses). Most of the defense modules were linked to techs you had to go out of your way to research. You couldn't add starbases to fleets, so they couldn't contribute if you were using ships to defend them.
criteria for starbase balance would be:
1. What amount of ships should a starbase be able to take alone.
2. To what time in the game does the balance tip one way or the other.
3. What hull type.
I'd rather have it so some ships are still needed to defend starbases, otherwise I doubt the devs could find a sweet spot for weapons a majority of players would agree with.
DARCA ;- )
Well, one point I can see off the top of my head is that strong starbases render resource nodes pretty inflexible. Maybe that's a good thing. But the larger point is the strategic goals one forms in a game. How important are starbases to be? Something useful but inefficient to spam or something nearly essential such that more starbases equals the win. Somewhere in between is the balance.
Darca, I agree with your points. I'm not opposed to keeping a light flotilla for added base defense, I just want fixed fortifications to be useful.
I think we'll all be happier when the game is finished. 
Well considering they said in the last live cast you could get a star base to 100 attack and defense across the board with all the add-ons I am leaning towards not very strong.
100 across the board sounds decent until you realize that also during that live cast the two titan fleet had scores well over 200. So honestly, sadly, I don't see star bases being all that potent. That 100 probably won't be all that impressive by the time you have actually researched everything to get it.
If that is the case and its not going to be adjusted then starbase defenses should just be removed from the game, at that point its not a feature its a trap. Players familiar with the game will know that starbase defenses aren't very good especially considering how much it takes to build them up and only new players will build them.
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