Not to mention you could place mines right outside the radius of your starbase or other defensive platforms to protect your starbase.  The anti structure units cost alot of supply (in the 18 ish range cant remember?) so its not like your going to see a fleet of these guys knocking at your door waiting to rape your civilization. 

I agree more hangers and squadrons from the starbase will help you from a smaller fleet, but anything in the larger fleet range unprotected with no mines or other defensive platforms and its pretty much a sitting duck.

nonsense.

The ships don't do THAT much damage. SB' in a half decent defense grid can weather quite some damage and nothing i repeat nothing should stop you from having your own squad of defense carriers in the region.

Yeah, um hate to break to it to you, but that is what those are fore...build more of a defense next time.

I think, if anything, the anti-Structure cruisers are more unbalanced versus other structures, 3 Ogrov's take out pretty much any defensive structure in one salvo.  Which is fine I guess, they are specifically designed to destroy structures and be tehsuck against everything else.  But maybe Anti-Structure Cruisers could fire just a little slower, especially those advent Starfish of doom...   TEC has a real advantage with starbase defense though, 2 Dunov Battlecruisers + a max Defense + Offense and Docking Boon Starbase to restore dunovs antimatter and Mr. Starbase has infinite shield power.

I think if nothing else, this post shows just how clever the AI is, which is refreshing in an RTS game, however, pointing out what may or may not be an issue, does anyone else notice that if you set up a FFA game versus AI in t he start even if you set teams to be seperate (But unlocked, because locked ruins the diplomacy dynamic) all the AI seems to still start allied together making aggresive expansion virtually impossible?  More than once I found 5 different colored fleets bombing my planets together only to steamroller right back down to my homeworld.  I think this is kinda weak.  Forces me to play conservatively which is monster fail.  If this is intentional game design, whooptey do, I'll deal with it, but if this is a bug I think it oughta be put out there.  I don't know which, so I won't bother sticking up a whole new post about it.

I agree with Starhound in that the extreme long range weapons should be able to attack defense busters. If fighters are attacking your fleet, you can at least have your fleet engage the carriers, but when torpedo frigates attack a SB, the SB can't do anything except sit there and watch itself die. Even though they are meant to counter SBs, they should not be impervious to SBs, just as no other counter in the game is completely immune to whatever it counters.

I also think that the way the AI uses them should be tweaked a little. Despite the high fleet supply, the TEC AI in particular likes to build lots of them. I was attacked by a fleet that had about 20 of them in. That seems a little excessive.

This last thing is a little off-topic, but does it bug anyone else when the torpedo frigates attack your ships? It doesn't do much, but the massive explosions block your veiw and prevent you from telling what's going.

Just my $0.02

The Torpedo cruisers can attack ships now so they behave normaly. In beta 1 the structure attack was an ability. While it meant they didn't attack ships at all, it also caused really weird behaviour with fleets and orders. Although the explosisons are kind of over the top against ships, the torpedos do hardly any damage so its not a balance problem.

I also think it might be reasonable to have the "extreme" range weapons work on torpedo cruisers, but they need to do their job better then bombers do since carriers can sit totally out of range, and I'll note that 10 carriers worth of bombers will flatten a Starbase in no time.

I just had my Adjudicators go crazy attacking a little constructor because they had no other targets. It sure looked flashy for dealing 1 point of damage per shot. I'd rather they didn't fire at all.

That could be fixed by giving the Starbases flak guns to reduce the amount of bombers attacking it.

All cap ships and starbases should have AA guns to deal with fighters....maybe not as strong as regular AA but something.  Also starbases should be able to hit anything in the grav well...look at my simple diagram.  Say you place the starbase (x) there in the grav well and the O is the planet.  Then the starbase can hit anything in that area.  It is resistance free in space (screw gravity from planets...for easier play).  They should be able to hit anywhere.  And the missiles/long range attack would then be able to hit anything in the grav well...meaning the long range attack should be able to lock on and target....missiles...

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That was sorta unorganized but can anyone agree to that?

Wow, after the first 6 posts I lost hope for the thread but wow, I finally got some support.

I think Kyogre said it best on what I was getting at,

You can't be ballanced and still tilted to one side, so you can't have a counter that is completely impervious to a defence right? I don't want a 100% nerf just a small range decrease so it's ar least a two way fight instead of the easy slaughter it is now. After all should arround 4000 credits of ships beat a 10000 credit starbase without casualties?

Actually there is an upgrade that already does that, but if that is the case I hope that starbases get a researchable  15%ish range buff too since for every attack there should be a defence. (after all it's the need for a ballanced stratagy and not simply a one unit spam game we're after right?)

Precisely, that is why it annoys me to have to leave a cap there to desroy the orgovs they sent

Thanks to all who posted, both the supporters and the contructive critics (e.g. Anatar ), heck let's even thank the less constructive ones (you know who you are Vraptor lol) keep on posting and let's find the ballance we need in this!

P.S. I know it looks bad my starbase being distroied by the AI and all, but I have two things to say in my defence #1. I'm not whining about this beacuse I lose one starbase, it's beacuse this threatens to make starbases nearly useless and #2. I did get mad and simeltaniously novalith all 5 of the Ai's worlds at once lol  !