What beats me is why there's a need for the constructor to arrive in the first place.

Sure it's a game element... Which degrades into nothing better than a pointless mountain of micro faster than you can say "Look, Martha! Those folksy shipyards are making one constructor per turn!". From that point onwards it's nothing better than a ship-moving chore and a management screen juggling lumped into one big pile of disappointment.

IMHO it should only take one to establish a base and chose a "focus" for it. Maybe one more per added feature (such as relic farm sensor upgrade etc) and in worst case one more per new "feature" of the econ base. But DEFINITELY not one per upgrade level per feature.

If you're worrying about balance make the construction modules cost more, or make the stations require money to upgrade instead, or even force the player to defend the "supply routes" to the bases. Just stop the "micro hell" nonsense already.

Or better yet, stop the star base spam altogether. You know, so that it actually get to be a weighted decision and not a management mockery that it is now. "Look!, there's half a reason to put a star base here! Now, where's my constructor? Shipie-shipie-shipie..."

I found in GalCiv2 I rarely built starbases, but the new resources make it essential now to build them everywhere there's one of the many resources.  It seems like I now have twice the number of starbases as planets.  And mid-game I'm cranking out constructors one per turn and sending them to every corner of the map.  It can get tedious.  As a solution, it would be nice to be able to upgrade starbases without constructors.  Perhaps starbase upgrades could be built the same way ships are built.  Instead of production being allocated to a ship, it could be allocated from a shipyard to improving starbases.  This would work as such:

1.  Starbase improvements have costs in manufacturing, same as ships.

2.  Based on the distance to starbase, there would be a distance penalty imposed.

3.  Player would be able to specify a queue of what improvements to build at which starbases.  This would require the shipyard to give players a list of starbases, their possible upgrades, and upgrade costs.

Would this work?

Still waiting on this.

Open the Starbase Auto Upgrade pod bay doors please, Paul.

I'd like it if an economic starbase could produce its own construction points in lieu of increasing production and automatically use them for everything except sensors and weapons. You could just toggle the 'improve' on and when it finished it would automatically switch back to providing production bonuses.

Military and cultural starbases you would still have to build, and you'd need a constructor module or three to get an economic starbase going (or to increase its sensors and weapons). Mining and artifact research starbases could work on the same principle - deferring production to build improvements, or you could ship constructors in as we do now.