Starbase Core Ability "Phaselane Blockade"

Dunno about block travel, but maybe slow it down signifigantly WITH the proper upgrades.

Blocking travel would get rid of the chance of raids, losing an important part of the game's strategy. It would all be frontline warfare then, very predictable, less interesting. Maybe short term blocks with a high AM use.

How about the ability to bock outgoing phase travel? Or some phase inhibitor effect amplified. Beause you can still just go through a planet with a starbase.

the purpose is to force a battle at the starbase (assuming they get a buff or synergys with other things. right now they are rather expensive roadblocks that ppl can either go around or simply overrun with a small fleet.) .

The blocakde is limited to a single lane because a full block of a whole phaselane cluster seems kind of overpowered.

Making it a ability that eats am  is reasonable.

I don't think there should be a complete blockade of phase lanes or any other "destroy Starbase before going anywhere" type of defense.

Starbases should have AM dependent abilities to mess with fleets that are trying to pass through.

Such as a Tractor Beam / Telekinetic pull type ability that could be used to keep ships from reaching the edge of the gravity well. Not all ships from a big fleet but a certain amount. The Transcencia's Mass Disorientation could be used to send a part of a fleet drifting if it actually had some range. The bases need abilities to divide and stall fleets while strikecraft destroy as many as they can. Or an ability to inflict a lot of damage in a short amount of time from long range (with a long cooldown). Again, Meteor Storm is this kind of ability but it does not have the range needed.

The ability to divide a big fleet in half would already be a tactical victory combined with surprising the other half by jumping in a fleet of your own.

The Vasari base could have an ability to disrupt initiated phase jumps and shut down phase drives for a certain amount of time. That would work with the current PJI's as well as the PJI would give the Orkulus enough time to get in range. Scouts could still escape the base with their fast speed and the anti-PJI upgrade.

The idea is that fleets would take losses if they tried to sneak by a Starbase but it would still be possible without destroying it. And that there would be countermeasures such as using light frigates or cap ship abilities to remove the base's AM, and sending in decoy fleets and such.

finally ideas come rolling ^^

/signed

Absolutely agree with OP. Defensive structures are so often pointless since enemies can just roll right on through and wipe out your core worlds, laugh at you, then call the game. And no one has the time or resources to build up stellar defenses at every single planet.

Agree totally. Starbases are very exspensive and give very little. The least you can do for someone who spent the large amount of resources to build one for the purpose of defence against small raids and a slowdown for large fleets is to give the starbase the ability to acomlish its purposes or atleast one of them.

One ability that could help is to give starbases a 3 point ability.

Lv1. Adds 1000% phase chargup to enemys trying to jump to friendly planets that have a phase inhibiter there. Without phase inhibitor only 50% efficient. This would be equal in usefullness to your average phase inhibitor.

Lv2. Blocks enemys from phase jumping to friendly planets that have a phase inhibitor. Full level 1 ability if no phase inhibittor.

Lv3. Blocks enemys from phase jumping to friendly and neutral planets. Also adds 300% charge up time for enemys to phase jump away from the grav well to their planets and 500% to jump to neutral. Again need phase inhibitors to be fully effective or the level 1 ability would only take effect for friendly planets.

Im assuming that starbases with this ability count as phase inhibitors aswell.

These would cost alot of resources and count against you upgrade points for your starbase. Someone doing this for all of their chokepoints into their space would need alot of resources to build this up and to add defenses to assist the starbases (turrets, hangar bays, etc). Also they would need to place phase jump inhibitors or leveled up starbases in their planets that connect to that one for the ability to be fully effective or to work at all. The idea of starbases is if you spend enouf resources then you shouldnt have to worry as much. This is alot of resources and remoes much worry.

they r nice agains pirates.P

Absolutes such as a complete blockage of a phase lane tend to be overpowered easily. A single base could stop all raids. That would make the game really static - one big fleet vs. another one at the border of two empires.

A built in PJI would be useful but since all factions already have PJI's available I'd like to see the bases have something more creative that would work with the PJI's. Made suggestions in my post above.

And I wouldn't mind if PJI's had enough range to cover the entire grav well. They can be destroyed easily enough.

A temporary blocker is possible - msybe a 30 second block costing 150 antimatter for example.  Then if you saw a monster fleet coming, you could give yourself enough time to get to the grav well with the starbase and put up a fight.

How about a phase lane narrower thing?  Instead of being able to jump at a large range around the actual lane, the ability/upgrade would narrow the range of the closest phase lane.

Yup as I said in another post, narrowing the lanes while the SB is present would:

1) fix the problem of going around - now placement actually means something

2) weapon range again is better since you can't scoot on by with the narrower lane - you'd have to get within weapons range

3) useful in every grav well - even neutrals - and the suns become even more stragec

I would however like to see certain bonuses given to SB's placed in neutrals

asteroid fields  - with the SB's bigger size it should be a lot easier to hit so the -20% should be -10% and at the same time should be able to harvest additional resources, even if there are not nodes, say something like 1 resource each at .5 on top of anything else that might be present

space junk - each race should be able to gain a bonus that sould be specific to their base and metla gain of .3

Advent - inspecting the junk shows their reseachers the true origions or something lore-like. give them an additional cultural boost that increases damage

TEC - spare parts and materials available for manufacturing give an additionla 25% speed increase

Vasari - some excuse to boost the colony pods

gas giants - suck the gas off for a crystal gain of .5

magentic storms - the SB should be able to amplify it's shield generators with an additional .5 shield regen

plasma storm - im sure someone can coem up with something here

sun - again something useful here

Those aer my ideas so far :/

You can't take a planet that has that speacial "Goverment" thing built in it; until you destroy the SB.  Having a SB block jumping to other friendly planets (IF the SB has the upgrade and UNTIL the SB is destroyed) sounds like the same thing to me; just need a, like, lvl 7ish reasearchable.

Also, anybody think of "Tractor Beams", a classic in most any Sci-Fi space battle; the SB can hold 1 or more ships in it; pull them slowly toward it; some can still get away, but there will be a price to be payed by the fleet. . .

How about the tracter beam, that sounds like an awesome idea, I still think that it should be a permanently on ability. Because otherwise you can juse go around the things. 

This is soooo overpowered.

Imagine a map where to get into another empire, you need to go through a planet that only has two phase lanes. One to go further in and one to enter. You block the entrance and that planet can never be entered ever. What if it was the only entrance? Well, tough luck, cuz there is nothing you can do except try to tech to superweapon (booooring). And even if its not, now there is no strategy. You juist put your defenses on your other frontier.

I do think that starbases should be able to do a good amount of damage if someone enters from one phase lane though. No fleet killer or anything, but enough to make them rethink it. However.. its still really OP atm, and probably should only be left for a final upgrade bonus or something.

Well if you are the Vassari, just use the phase stabilizer and Kostura Cannon combo, and you can jump to any enemy planet that you want, and after doing the damage jump back to safety.

bypassing choke point's for the Vassari is easy.