Something non-essential I'm really hoping for in the next major update

[Liggi]

I would love for Starbases to be made more interesting. It'd be great to have a much greater variety of Starbase types and buildings, maybe even have them support a POP or two. Farming-focused starbases, mining-focused, research-focused, trade-focused, military-focused.

And can we make the Hyperlane Registrar actually worth building, too?

Like I say, not high on my priority list... but it would be cool.

 

[sillyrobot]

The hyperlane registrar is worth building now -- on at least one star base anyway. It increases the range of trade collection.

 

[Liggi]

The hyperlane registrar is worth building now -- on at least one star base anyway. It increases the range of trade collection.

Is this ever really an issue, though? You get a lot of collection range from gun / missile batteries and hangar bays. I never usually need to extend it much further.

 

[sillyrobot]

Is this ever really an issue, though? You get a lot of collection range from gun / missile batteries and hangar bays. I never usually need to extend it much further.

No, weapons offer protection range not collection range.

You get collection range from trade modules and the hyperlane registrar. 7 hyperlane jumps for collection is better than 6, the previous maximum.

 

[Pancakelord]

I would love for Starbases to be made more interesting. It'd be great to have a much greater variety of Starbase types and buildings, maybe even have them support a POP or two. Farming-focused starbases, mining-focused, research-focused, trade-focused, military-focused.

And can we make the Hyperlane Registrar actually worth building, too?

Like I say, not high on my priority list... but it would be cool.

Agreed, not sure why anyone would downvote this. Starbases are dull AF, youve got the following choices:

• mixed/random setup
• Anchorages + Naval Logistics Office
  • Always useful.
• Defence stations
  • Useful till about 2250s/2300s (depending on tech scaling settings)
    • For biasing AI decision-making [they wont attack a system if enemy fleet power is too great vs their own scoped fleet, this includes starbase FP] - after that they can get melted quickly when fleet FP > Starbase FP.
    • And a well built player fleet can melt them long before that (e.g. Destroyers with L-slot lasers or corvettes with missiles in the early game.
• Shipyards + Fleet academy + colossal assembly yards
  • less important late game with mega shipyard
• Trade hubs + Offworld Trading Company + Hyperlane registrar
  • Until you get gateways, then even this isnt really needed.

Really that boils down to

1. A few defence stations on early-game chokepoints (if you like that sort of thing/dont have >1x HL setting),
2. Shipyards (of which you need 1-2),
3. trade hubs which (if being optimal) you typically need 2-3 of [then you get rid of them with gateways]
4. and lots and lots of anchorage spam.

There is very little strategy in the starbase system, next to no RP potential and the "non-standard" buildings that are still in the game (a lot of stuff like Neutronium Ore refineries were cut with 2.0 / strategic resources changes), like solar panels or nebula refineries aren't worth the effort to build as they offer such pathetic returns.

 

[Jman5]

You could do something creative with Habitats to get something like this. If you build a habitat around the star, it replaces the outpost/starbase and acts as one instead. Then you can build all the stuff you can build on a starbase there as well as make it a place where people live.

Imagine if you had this mean bastion habitat guarding some important system with a strong garrison defending inside. Attackers would have a 2-phase process to take the systems. First phase is to disable the guns. Then they have to go in and capture the habitat with ground forces to fully secure the system.

 

[Pancakelord]

You could do something creative with Habitats to get something like this. If you build a habitat around the star, it replaces the outpost/starbase and acts as one instead. Then you can build all the stuff you can build on a starbase there as well as make it a place where people live.

Imagine if you had this mean bastion habitat guarding some important system with a strong garrison defending inside. Attackers would have a 2-phase process to take the systems. First phase is to disable the guns. Then they have to go in and capture the habitat with ground forces to fully secure the system.

I like this idea, it'd definitely curtail habitat spam and makes some sense I'm terms of how an empire might develop (people would congregate around the one piece of infrastructure in a system, perhaps even migration calculations should be run on a system level rather than a planetary one) and have seen it thrown around a bit over the years, but it has some issues like

• You'd need to rethink habitats,
• They'd need health bars to still allow the starbase to be wiped out in total war scenarios or via special events
• And you can't currently dismantle a megastructure, but you can dismantle a starbase. These are minor things to correct for but would have larger balance implications.
• It also doesn't actually make starbase modules more interesting, just adds another tab to them.

I still think it has merit though.

The other option might be to give up on starbases as a mechanical dead end and move all this over as an "Orbital tab" for non-colony-shelter planets.

Now you only build outposts to claim a system (no upgrading them) and then specialise a planet's orbital layer into

• Defense & platform command
  • Allows for FTL inhibition
  • Allows the planet to build defence platforms
• Shipyards & ship modules
• Trade & commerce gateways
• Orbital research facilities
• Additional districts with a micro habit swarm/planetary ring
• Fleet infrastructure & Anti piracy
• Gestalt special things like hives getting orbital admin cap options or breeding facilities and machines getting orbital solar clusters & cooling radiators for all those hot machines
• Orbital culture (unity) generation
  • Tourism
  • Or orbital cathedrals for spiritualism
• Planetary gateway station (lol)

I think the issue with spaceports is: They lack interesting choices
And the cause of this is:

1. Starbases are divorced from planets,planets got a rework making them interesting, starbases were never brought up to par. If anything the 2.0 changes removed extra choice as we lost many starbase modules (and special resources)
   • Starbases exist as a mechanic in isolation, they don't work nearly as closely with planets as they should. Orbital infrastructure is the gateway to the galaxy.
   • In Stellaris it's an ABC choice between
     • shipyards
     • tradehubs
     • anchorages
   • By handling Starbases at a system level, you can't tailor modules to multiple different planet types in said system,
   • You also increase CPU time as out-of-scope starbase variables (planets need to inspect the starbase, jumping between scopes) need to be considered in planetary calculations,
     • if starbases were just an orbital layer (another planet tab, with extra gfx around the planet) they could be an internal variable in planetary calculations, possibly increasing performance on top of enhancing planet customisation.
2. Starbases simply lack an economic niche.There isn't anything you can do in space on a starbase building (better) that you can't do on a planet or habitat, too.
   • Pre2.0 we had a ton of special resources that made Starbases a good place for specialist orbital refineries
   • Habitats post 2.0 also act as specialist facilities with their atypical districts
3. Combat effectiveness is at the mercy of galaxy RNG.Defence Starbases seem to be balanced to take advantage of stellar weather (e.g. building a bastion in a neutron system) & choke points
   • This means that unless 2 RNG rolls align, defence stations are utterly useless.
     1. finding a choke point actually useful to your empire
     2. Then finding space weather on that choke point that actually enhances your defences
   • That isn't "strategy", it lacks any kind of agency at all - it's just rolling RNG and praying something good turns up, if it does great build a defence hub, if not ... another anchorage.
   • Buffing Starbases up also leads to a cliff-edge for balance, because of how their maths works and their limited potential to expand, a starbase will always be either
     1. Too strong to fight (v.early)
     2. Too weak to put up a fight (after early game)
   • Shifting defences to be planet centric would allow for increased scalability in high-colony systems, whilst leaving fringe systems to still be weak.

I think reworking Starbases into a planet orbital layer would also be needed for any kind of army rework, because armies don't really have enough to work with, an orbital layer bridges space/land combat nicely - the old army screen even had 3 layers to reflect this (and is why armies have been left to languish since 2.0s starbase changes).

• Right now armies assault the planet surface directly once the starbase has flipped.
• What if your fleet had to wipe out orbital defense platforms around a planet,
• then you need to "devastate" the orbital layer before a ground assault - your fleet could do this slowly, but army boarding actions could do it far faster - essentially making army ships a specialised anti-defence ship-type. Attempting a planetary invasion by bypassing the enemy orbital infrastructure/"orbital defense armies"(interceptors) would yield cripplingly high losses (like storming a fort early in a siege in ck3)
• Then you could still have the planet invasion itself and ground war with enemy armies once everything else is handled.

 

[Ffc]

Not exactly the post, but I think that defence stations are really too weak in mid/late game.
If you did some sort of diplomatic game, you would want to invest more in static defence stations than in your fleet, but it's actually not worth at all.
Being static is a huge disadvantage for few advantages, it's always better just to invest in a fleet (at some points).
Also, with jump drive, the enemy can kinda jump in your Empire without having to destroy those stations, it should be like a jamming system, maybe with starbase.

 

[grommile]

strong, unbypassable defences = all doomstacks all the time.

 

[Ffc]

strong, unbypassable defences = all doomstacks all the time.

Against a defensive Empire it would make sense to regroup to force a passage and then split a bit since their fleet would be weaker as they invest in defense.

 

[GuildenSpur]

I play with my own mod to make starbases more powerful but also cost more. It doesn't mean more doomstacking per se. One big fleet can't take it, 2 can. It does mean a full end game fleet can't take it without losses and if you build a lot of defensive platforms, you will need 2 fleets to take it. For bigger enemy empires, it's a more serious speed bump but takeable nonetheless.

 

[Zagreb 887]

I would love for Starbases to be made more interesting. It'd be great to have a much greater variety of Starbase types and buildings, maybe even have them support a POP or two. Farming-focused starbases, mining-focused, research-focused, trade-focused, military-focused.

And can we make the Hyperlane Registrar actually worth building, too?

Like I say, not high on my priority list... but it would be cool.

Try NSC mod, it greatly improve Starbases, by adding lots of very interesting modules!

 

[Spaceception]

Defense platforms should be replaced with non-FTL capable fleets, so they have all the same evasive abilities as ships. You can build as many as you want, but if it exceeds the starbase cap, it'll eat into your naval cap too.

And I made a list of building improvements, since the current buildings are quite weak (Hydroponics for example, stayed at 3 food even after the 2.2 rework massively increased the overall number of pops, and on top of that, you can only build one). https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...e-enhancements-grasp-the-void-change.1342327/ however, that's just a start, and barring needed AI/management/performance improvements, I would be good with a more robust rework.

 

[Astax]

I also am looking for a good defnse mod for 1.9.1. Some of these starbase mods take it a bit too far! So far I have been able to leverage the base game defenses in some matter, but when facing purifier advance start AI on Hard or greater, I can't get to the right tech fast enough. Last game I was just 2 years short of having proper defenses when he rolled me with 10k+ to my 5k. Doesn't helpt hat he coudl force demands after takign jsut my cap.... but that's another story.