I can only assume your'e refering to resouce starbases.  My experience is to defend with ships.  No starbase is defensivable on it't own.  Remember the AI is more or less in the same position.

The scoremonster crowd seem to generally agree that arming starbases of any sort is a waste of resources and that the only sensible thing to do is defend them with fleets.

But depending on your map settings, choice of civ (tech tree) to play, acquired techs, military resource mines, and playstyle, you can have a game where fully-upgraded starbases end up exploiting some AI weaknesses and actually destroy large numbers of enemy ships that might have done you serious harm if they'd been sent into one of your core production areas instead of aimed at an isolated resource mine. I haven't seen it in a while, but more than a few times I watched a jaw-dropping number of enemy fleets follow one another to certain doom when they attacked one of my starbases.

Mind you, I'm pretty sure I've only seen this sort of thing happen because I'm not a maximizer and I do lots of things in a game that are more like playing with building blocks than they are like playing cards or chess.

Actually I tried to guard starbases with ships, but I found that pretty ineffecient. You constantly have to pay for these ships. You always got to watch over them, make them attack if an enemy nears, and you´ll need to upgrade them once the enemy has better weapons researched. this costs a hell usually....

Therefore I usually research the starbase defense tech very early in the game, enabling my starbases to have an attack of (sum) +90 with just 4 constructors, while the enemies ships are still round +5 or so. I never loose starbases. I you`ll instead tried to arm a ship with such firepower you´ll have to do a hell more research, and such build ship will cost you a hell day-by-day.

The Ai usually never researches starbase defense but concentrates on ship armament, and once I´m finished with my starbases I simply trade these technologies from an ally and got to war.

Parking ships on a starbase doesn't really do you any good because you've still got a bunch of money just sitting there.  Instead, you keep the enemy from getting there in the first place by blasting them on the front lines.

The table on the wiki shows you can get 93 attack with seven weapons modules.  So unless things have changed that drastically in TA...*shrug*

Or just a bunch of cargo hulls with a zillion sensor modules on them.  Not as efficient as EotU perhaps, but effective nonetheless

My previous comments were for DL with the old tech-tree.

Although in the bonuspacks it might be the same although I played with 2 races yet.

Last time (with the Yor) 4 military starbases with full-equipped ship support assured my enemies not to declare war to no time - even I did mine Ascention Crystals.

Because I had 30 tiny fighter (in 2 fleets) at a spot where the influence of all 4 military bases intersects. These tiny ships were equipped w +1 attack & +1 shield but with the support of the starbases their attack altogether was +1600 defense +800 too much for my enemies.

There´s a side fact I`m not so sure about. I researched Xalax-defense and Thulon-weapon focus, and added 2 ships with each one of them to my fleets. It should have added 20% increase in both attack/defense, but didn´t. The only thing was added was the support the ships had from the starbases....

Maybe this bonus-attack/defense is only used during an actual battle?

one time I played I focused generally on big warships choosing Drengin and warparty etc. However, it took my economy down right from the start, and I was the first to go in that game, the Torians gave me hell.

What a damn shame, defeated by some food errr neigbours....

Some very interesting ideas in this thread that I have never tried before. Nice!

In DA, there are three 30 attack modules for starbases, one for each weapon type, and three 16 defense modules, one for each defense type.

If I decide to arm my bases, I generally use the two 30 attack modules that work best against the enemy defenses and the one 16 defense module that matches the enemy weapon type. 

True, well, but they do it. That whole system is built to exploit some weaknesses in the AI´s way of playing (likewiese a ZYW or a Swindle et al would also not be possible against a real player....); however, because I don´t know what the AI´s had in store took some precautions for defending my starbases. First, as the Military Bases were the backbone of my military might they have been fully developed in attack/defense. They never were attacked. Second, I placed a lot of SensorShips around the Array, so I can muster incoming enemy forces. And the AI focused his strong warships only on these (unarmed) SensorShips, once locked on I withdrew that ship to the midst of the array, where it was destroyed...

I do still use this technique in ToA, although it`s harder to do... But some races do lack the SCC; thus a few MSB with 1/1 tiny´s can boost one military graph that might keep the AI from declaring war. A clumsy way, yes, but it works.

Willy - #18

Yes, it's the same in DA, the end of a long research path.  However, in my current Suicidal strategies, I try to delay wars until I am ready.  I end up researching just about everything I need and simply leave some research coming in late, and I research those techs then.  Meanwhile, I am assembling the invasion fleets, etc.