Opinions and glitches from the starbase's special abilities and non-military upgrades...
Advent:
- The Advent starbase's meteorite-hurling special abilities don't work at all. The graphics play but nothing happens.
- Also, the meteorites are graphically way oversized. It looks like this is a bug that also affects TEC's Kol battleship's cannon ability - the projectile is huge now.
- The "confusion" ability for Advent bases is a great way to throw a fleet into chaos and block off an area.
- The culture upgrades are questionable. The combination of adding friendly culture and suppressing hostile culture means that you almost always gain cultural influence into enemy systems 1 jump away. But if you wanted to build a tremendously expensive space object that grants you cultural dominion over a system and usually also over systems 1 jump away from there, and additionally increases your military power in the target system, you could build the Deliverance Engine instead.
- On the other hand, the allegiance upgrades are probably overpowered. With the combination of culture, Advent research, and these starbase upgrades, you can turn all your maximum-distance worlds with base 25% economy ratings into 75% worlds, tripling your economy. On some map geometries (i.e. disconnected areas accessible only by wormhole) there are lots of worlds like that. Not to mention, you can orbit one around your home world and get 150% economy at your base. The upgrades eventually pay for themselves, meaning that you can justify building starbases everywhere. And you still have 6 upgrade slots left over to make them tough defenders of your home turf.
TEC:
- The Docking Booms ability seems pretty good, although I haven't actually seen a pitched fleet battle with the ability active. Sometimes the base appears to autocast Docking Booms for no reason (i.e. there are no damaged or antimatter-depleted ships in range).
- The Last Resort ability is a cool idea and deals tremendous "screw you" damage to anyone who comes after your starbase, but I'm afraid to build it because you can accidentally hit the button and annihilate your own starbase AND your own fleet with one mistaken click. This ability really needs to have two buttons on the dashboard - one to "arm" it, and one to "fire", with the "fire" button only becoming active 5 seconds after you hit "arm" (which then turns into a "disarm" button).
- The ship construction yards upgrade is terrible. Try this comparison: A Vasari player can have 1 planet that has 5 frigate factories in orbit and a phase stabilizer built. If the Vasari player then builds a starbase, 1 upgrade can make the starbase create a phase node. Rally point the planet to the starbase and you can get frigates to the starbase's location at a 500% build rate.
For the same 1 starbase upgrade, the TEC player gets a 50% rate at the starbase's location. Sure, the TEC ships don't have to phase jump - they're built on-site. But they also can't get reinforcements from other planets with phase nodes, or use the phase node to jump out to other destinations.
You had to jump the constructor ship to the target location (plus its support fleet, if you're assaulting an enemy world) so you aren't really saving time in phase space - you could have just rallied ships from a planet with a factory, and the first ships off the factory line would have started arriving before the starbase finished building. You aren't saving build time, since plain vanilla orbital factories have a better build rate for a lower cost and you can build lots of them if you really want. You had to buy the starbase, the upgrade module, and the research to unlock the upgrade module instead of buying ships, so you aren't saving money. And if you aren't saving time or money, where exactly is the economy in this economic upgrade?
Vasari:
- The self-repair ability doesn't work at all. I can click the button but nothing happens except the ability cooldown triggering.
- The phase stabilizer ability's description says that it makes a temporary gate for 75 seconds, but it's actually a permanent passive ability that is always on.
- The phase stabilizer is powerful and useful; at the same time, it isn't a free lunch, since you have to have something to send. It feels like this upgrade is appropriately balanced given that it lets you connect a potentially hostile/uncolonizable area with a friendly base.
- I haven't tried the forward deflector shield ability, but I'm pretty sure that it's overkill. Is it that likely that you'll get attacked by a fleet that can't be survived with 4 armor upgrades and a repair system, but can be overcome through 4 armor ugprades, a repair system, and a shield ability? I would prefer to have an offensive ability rather than another defensive ability.
- The colony pods upgrade lets you get some credit revenue, but the trade port upgrade already does that. It's already been reported, but a bug lets you add colony pods without doing the research.
General:
- The upgrades don't always list what the benefits actually are, and special abilities sometimes don't list the effect numbers in the info card. For example, docking booms level 2 restores more hull and antimatter than level 1, but you can't tell that from the starbase upgrade screen, and it doesn't give the numbers when you hover over the ability.
- The trade port upgrades can actually be useful, but that's only because of how trade routes work now, which is going to be changed. Otherwise there's not much point in getting them. Given that military starbases are drastically more powerful than non-starbase military structures, I would expect that economic starbases be drastically more powerful than non-starbase economic strucures by the same amount.
