I know what you mean. In the earlier betas, I'd focus on starbases at my chokepoints. With the new AI behaviour being a bit more aggressive, this becomes completely impossible, as no matter how nice an early game starbase is, two AI fleets teaming up on it will take it down. Makes early game fleets more of a priority.
Actually, no, I found out over the weekend that this isn't completely true. I'll give the details of the games I played below, but if you don't care, skip to the dashed line.
I did a few more games using the same custom map as before, over the weekend, to test this out. It was actually one game done three times by restarting from earlier saves. The key is that map had three basic chokepoints: Planet A was the chokepoint with Red and Purple; Planet B was the chokepoint with Blue (the weakest player); Planet C was the chokepoint to Green and Yellow. B and C were only two jumps apart (meaning that in theory Blue or Green could hit either), A was on the far side of the empire. Within those chokepoints was a far-superior group of planets to what the rest of the players had; out of 66 non-pirate planets, I had nearly 20 in "my" section. The "chokepoints" were defined by pirate systems; if I could hold A, B, and C, the only other way to get a fleet into my empire would be to go through a pirate planet first; also, C was connected to my empire through B, so if I lost C, I'd only lose one intervening planet before B became the only frontier on that side of my empire. In each game I had peace with all of the other players (through bribes) long enough to colonize my planets and set up basic defenses.
ATTEMPT #1: The purple player colonized both planet A and one asteroid on my side of A, so I wasn't able to set up my own reinforced starbase chokepoint there, although I was able to build a starbase in his well (while he was an ally). While my front-line planets had some defenses, none were fully stocked with defenses when the fighting started. Once peace broke down, Red and Purple overran the A starbase and proceeded to rampage through my empire. On the other side of the empire, the planet C starbase, heavily upgraded and with a full well of supporting structures, was eventually destroyed when three enemy fleets (Blue, Green, Yellow) hit it at once, and I had to fall back to B. Things got untenable at about 1h45m; with most of my crustal defenses gone, there was little to stop the enemy fleets from running amok.
ATTEMPT #2: Rewound fifteen minutes and bought MORE starbase techs, made sure to max out the starbase upgrades at the three border planets, and bought more defense structures on my front-line planets. Again, all of my alliances eventually broke down and I was hit by five fleets at once. This time, it worked, sort of; the A starbase still died, although it lasted long enough to deal massive damage to the Red and Purple fleets, enough that they couldn't attack the next line of planets well (since I'd now built my defenses a bit more in depth), and a new front line formed once I built a replacement starbase at the next planet. The C starbase survived, partially because of those additional planet defenses, and partially because this time the Blue player (the weakest opponent, with only five planets) hit B instead of C, and the B starbase handled them easily without any fleet help.
At this point, after two hours of carnage, I rewound back to the 15m autosave. I would have won in the previous attempt, but it was messy and I wanted to see how much the game could be improved if I hadn't waited until that last minute to buy the defenses and techs needed for my starbases. Knowing the map, now, gave me a pretty good advantage as well.
ATTEMPT #3: The key difference is that I ran forward and grabbed planet A before the purple player could get it, skipping past a couple asteroids along the way just to make sure I'd get there first. This made ALL the difference; when things turned inevitably bad with the Red player, his fleet hit a fully-defended planet with a fully-upgraded starbase, instead of a lone base in an ally well. (Purple never turned on me, because he kept giving me diplomacy missions to destroy Red ships. Likewise, Blue never turned on me, because he kept asking for resources.) Also, I built the maximum defenses at each front-line planet; C, for instance, was a 40-point well, so now it had, in addition to the starbase: a phase stabilizer, a nano jammer, a PJI, five hangars (6F/4B), and six turrets in a ring around the planet.
I managed to last through nearly the entire game with almost NO fleet. I had a grand total of eight capital ships and no combat cruisers or frigates ships at all, until I had reached the point where I had every non-fleetsize tech in the tree and had placed fully-upgraded starbases around each ALLY'S planets. (-19% support instead of -56% means that I had an income of 250+ credits, 25 metal, and almost 20 crystal per tick, which made buying upgrades and such insanely fast.) Those eight ships were getting insane XP simply by sitting on the far sides of the wells as my starbases ripped apart the enemy fleets, and reached level 10 quickly. Obviously I could have won much sooner, but I wanted to make sure that the starbase-based defenses really COULD hold up against a late-game AI fleet, and they did.
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The point is this: the Vasari starbase, without support and with normal tech progression, will die quickly against a concerted attack. But I discovered that with a fully-structured defense net around it, and with a player going straight for the new starbase-specific techs (especially the one that adds 10% damage and +1 target per bank, which combined are nearly a 40% increase in damage output), it can handle entire AI fleets on its own, without any help from a mobile fleet, and can even handle multiple fleets with minimal support. You don't NEED ships healing the starbase, if it's got all four defense upgrades plus a shield. The only real failing with building all of my starbases 3off/4def/1shield is the lack of fighter cover, but hangars handled that pretty well. I mean really, with 22k HP and an armor rating of THIRTY, and a deflector shield of course, a fully-upgraded Vasari SB can take a tremendous beating, all the while dealing out an impressive amount of carnage. (The caveat is that this is against an AI player, who didn't try to stop me from engaging his few torpedo ships.)
Obviously, players don't have the resources to fully upgrade starbases at every attackable planet on a typical map. So, you'll need mobile fleets in most cases. But if you've got a map where you KNOW which planet will be attacked, a teched-out starbase and full defenses will slaughter practically anything that an AI can throw at it. (Seriously, at one point in Attempt #2 I had three starbases holding the line against FIVE Hard AIs for nearly two hours.)
Also, I discovered that there's a small bug with the Vasari starbase that micromanagement solves. No, I don't mean the bank targeting bug we all know and love; it's about the disintegrator beams. For whatever reason, their range seems to be SLIGHTLY shorter than that of the pulse beams. This means that a starbase, left to its own devices when attacking a structure (like an enemy starbase) will stop once it enters pulse beam range, just outside of disintegrator range. And so, it won't use its best anti-structure weapon; in a straight-up fight, no supporting fleets or structures, one of my Vasari SBs was losing badly to an Advent base with only three defense upgrades and only 19 armor. But if I order the starbase to move closer manually, it'll immediately start firing all weapons again, and the difference in anti-structure damage is tremendous; now, my SB outperformed the Advent base by far. Against fleets this bug isn't an issue, but when using the base offensively it's a big shift.
