Before venturing into this post, one must be familiar with giving the AI techs only it can see and make use of, gone over in good depth here.

Now, to begin, it's well known that the AI is awful at upgrading starbases. There's a seemingly simple solution to this; have the AI build starbases that already have upgrades. Now, how the hell does one do that?

In SoGE, we've made it so that the starbase construction ability actually costs nothing (0 antimatter), and divided the costs of making a starbase among buying the constructor itself and buying the starbase's upgrades. This is important as you can code the ability such that it is "upgraded" by the AI-only tech, to a level that costs more antimatter that the ship has, effectively locking out that ability for good (reference here). The AI-only tech also unlocks a new ability, another starbase construction ability that spawns a starbase that already has upgrades integrated into it; this ability costs resources to use, and thus insures the AI doesn't have a resource advantage with it's new starbases, just a construction time advantage (reference here). Further, one could multiple starbase construction abilities, each with different starbases that have different upgrades done, to get some variety in the AI's starbase makeup.

I'm sure that others have thought this, or something similar before, but I figure this will be useful for some.