Starbase Hitpoints

I agree. Do like the idea that starbases start out as unassailable except by a maxed-out fleet, then get relatively weaker as the game goes on.

But they shouldn't ever be taken down with ease by single medium-size ships. That's just ridiculous.

The tech tree is just weighted SO INCREDIBLY FAR towards ships. They get no benefit from miniturization except buildup time, none of the ship health techs effect them, combat modules scale FAR slower than ship defenses and weapons, and most of the weapon/defense specializations are again ship only.

They SHOULD become less unassailable(if undefended) as the game goes on, but this is too far. A starbase should not be such a soft target. If every ship bonus tech also effected starbases and shipyards, that might fix half the problem. They still can't get anything from component bonuses, but you have to choose that, rather than having no option like it is now.

I posted a similar thread a while back. They are going to redo star bases completely. I would like to see a fully upgraded base  have 3x the hit points of a huge ship with equal or higher attk/defenses.

If you or the ai are going to invest over 20+ constructor modules to FULLY upgrade a starbase then it should be a very tough nut to crack.

More modules is assuredly not what starbases need, especially since balancing starbases with ships under the current model is a fool's errand; you cannot do it because you cannot know how powerful the ships will be at most stages of the game. By the end of the game, one player could have +70% hull capacity due to specialization choices, another might not have taken any of the bonuses to (effective) hull capacity, somebody else could have gotten sort of vaguely lucky and used tech trading to acquire every last hull capacity bonus and component size reduction in the game for an effective hull capacity bonus of something like +300% (probably more; looking through the Terran tech tree, you can get up to a 70% reduction in weapon and armor component sizes, a 60% reduction in shield, point defense, drive, and sensor component sizes, and a 25% reduction in support component sizes, as well as a 70% increase in hull capacity from technologies). And that's just from technologies that directly affect effective hull capacity; this isn't considering the Hyperion Shrinker (which, with only a moderate amount of level stacking, could easily be granting around +50% hull capacity on its own), Helios Ore (which might not seem like much at +5% per resource, but it can add up, particularly on larger hulls or with stacked component size reduction techs), the Design Revolution event (+10% hull capacity per event, with the only 'drawback' being that you need to take Malevolent ideology points with each bonus), the empire bonus you can take at the start of the game for +10% or +20% hull capacity, and maybe one or two other things I've forgotten. Starbases, meanwhile, have a very fixed set of potential builds; outside of a handful of techs that provide bonuses to starbase defenses (while providing the same bonus to ship components of the appropriate type), there is nothing in the game which can affect the maximum strength of a starbase. Just try and balance that against ships whose power levels are as wildly variable as this game's ships are. Then realize that hull capacity is just potential power, and as wildly as the potential power of a ship varies, the actual power, being dependent upon how the ship's hull capacity is actually spent, varies even more wildly - you could have ship A with attack/defense scores of x/X, y/Y, and z/Z, and ship B, with twice the (effective) hull capacity of ship A, may have exactly the same attack/defense scores (thus being no more powerful in any given engagement than ship A) despite having twice the potential power due to having twice the effective hull capacity, while ship C, which like ship B has twice the effective hull capacity of ship A, has twice the attack and defense scores of ships A and B put together (but perhaps gutted its drive systems to manage this, and so while it's incredibly powerful in any given engagement, it isn't a particularly powerful unit overall because it's just not that mobile).

This is a major issue when it comes to discussing the 'balance' of starbases against fleets, because especially by the late game (when starbases are at their most costly, due to the irritating feature of having to build every single obsolete module in order to get the state-of-the-art modules that you want) a ship can trivially be several times more powerful than the baseline ship strength would indicate. What opposition do you want the starbases to be balanced against? I guarantee you that a Huge-hulled ship which has the maximum bonuses to effective hull capacity that its designer could get for it and which spent that hull capacity almost exclusively on weapons and defenses presents an enormously different threat profile than a Huge-hulled ship that has the same bonuses to effective hull capacity but spent about half of its hull capacity on drive systems at the cost of weapons or defenses, and both of these ships present enormously different threat profiles than a Huge-hulled ship designed by a player who didn't stack the effective hull capacity bonuses and so has a much more limited potential power even if the hull is packed with weapons and defenses to the exclusion of all else.

I would say that the best thing that could be done for starbases under the present model isn't 'balancing' them to be competitive with an equivalently-advanced small fleet (because good luck with that, what with how variable ship strength can be), but rather reducing the number of modules that are required to fully upgrade a starbase.

starbases only become sitting ducks later in the game when larger fleets are roaming around.  that's ok.  but when there is a fleet defending the starbase, id like the starbase to assist in the fleet to fleet battle, not just sit behind the lines until the defending fleet is destroyed.  you could position the starbase in the upper middle of the combat screen between the two fleets so that the starbase can fire earlier and more often (it should still be lowest target priority for attacking fleet).

I think that there should be some very powerful late game ideas for stabases so that they end up like Sins, where they are very powerful ... at a price of course.

I think it needs to be balanced. Starbases shouldn't be unbeatable either. It should have a weapons, and defence tech tree like ships do. Their should be module upgrades that increase hit points. The same as the hitpoint increase from one hull size as the other, or hit point increase increase the same percent as hull increase as you scale up hulls for new starbases. Either method.

Now let's talk weapons, and other modules. Maybe give you ahull where you add stuff like ships. Now if we do this the hitpoints could be the same. Tech wise you could add new trees, or we could use the appropriate ship tech either way. Or you could increase the module proportionate with tech size and potency. 

I don't really agree that starbases should be super strong by default.  How exactly does one cheap constructor vomit forth the death star?

Star bases should be weak until improved thru many constructors OR if you want them to be mini death stars that need fleets to take them out then you should have to build some kind of fleet sized constructor project to go out and build them over many turns since it's even more silly to think one little constructor that took your uber prod star port 1 turn to build can just plop down a fleet killer.

I think the current system works fine - if you want a beefy starbase, you need to dump a lot of constructors on it and upgrade it - and you need to research techs that allow you to beef up its defenses and offense.

I also don't the intention is for starbases to be the be all end all of military.  If you REALLY want that starbase defended, stick a fleet of warships near it.

My real problem with starbases is that they are nothing special.  You need to build a bazillion of them such that the game becomes more starbase sim than anything else.  Even with all resources and such on rare there are still so many you need scores of starbases.  That and the constructor onslaught get to be kind of tedious to deal with.

I could see starbases having a bit more oomph and being more defensively powerful if you didn't have to litter the galaxy with them by the dozen.

But by the time you bother to upgrade everything the enemy fleet far surpasses it. Which means you shouldn't bother upgrading star base combat. Even adding a defending fleet doesn't really help. The attacker has to fight the fleet first true, but the star base doesn't really help in that fight. IF star bases started the combat in between the two fleets ( say in the upper middle of the screen) then the star base could fire earlier and more often and those upgrades would be worth it.  also increase the number of guns they have. It's sad seeing a huge star base fire only one missle etc.

I agree that balancing is very tough thing in Galactic Civilizations 3 and there are tons of settings at the moment which don't correlate to game settings.

But that does not mean that we can not improve the concept itself and offer a way for star bases to gain more hit points.

My opinion is that Star Bases are fine just the way they are. They shouldn't be mega fortresses. One can add many weapon and defensive enhancements to them. 

One great thing about GC3 compared to GC2 is that in GC2 the basic SB was defenseless and any tiny ship with a pop gun could destroy it before you added defenses.

I do with the the AI's in GC3 would use a couple constructors to beef up important SB's, however.