LOL point taken.

Either you're much much better with the Yor than I am, you missed a digit in there or you aren't colonizing.  If you are that good you should have no trouble taking down opposing starbases.  If you aren't colonizing you're likely to get swamped because everyone else is and is building their industrial base faster than you are and those starbases aren't likely to fix the situation you've put yourself in, especially as they can just go around the starbase!!!!!  Lastly if you missed a digit, sounds about right but so can everyone else and they can again easily build a fleet to take down the starbase.

I'm not asking for super fortresses just equal to the time and production that is put into building the military starbase.  I don't think anyone is agruing against undefended, non-military starbases being anything but easy meat.  Since starbases can't go on the offensive and is either serving another purpose and is supplemented with military modules to try to protect it or has no other reason than existing to cause it to be attacked, maybe range extension but there are other ways to undermine that as well.  If you're killing the starbase to degrade your enemies economy, that not worth loosing a ship on occasion at least?  If its purely military, why are you bothering with it until you know you will win?   

My yor are fixed. It was a simple thing to correct the broken xml file once it was found. So don't make stupid assumptions.  Have you played galciv 2? This game needs to follow suit, starbases are VERY easy to destroy in that one, and should be in this one too.

the Iconia system has no secondary planet & iconia is pretty high PQ as a result.  If all he built on iconia were factories. it's not too out of the realm of possabilities.  By:

• Turn 37, I can do it in 4 with iconia & one other nearby system's world feeding the iconian starbase.  Researched up to ruer III factories (manufacturing collective) out of the gate with 50/50 research/industry on both planets building factories.  constructor= cargo hull & constructor module... It does't need to go far/fast, no engines or support is fine.
• By 44, I can do it in 3& probably sooner if excess production rolled over to the next item as both worlds have been building an improvement every 1-2 turns for a while.
• at 49, I'm able to pop one out every other turn& by 60 will have the manufacturing starbase tech finished with two of those  starbases affecting both planets along with more factories:).
• By Turn 61 (probably sooner), I just had to move the sliders from 50/50 to 100 manufacturing to get local constructors to (likely) <1 turn, but again no excess rollover in queues right now.  another few turns and I would have an extra 20% manufacturing from the second starbase

Interesting enough, rush tier3 manufacturing & a massive local industrial base is a better strat for the first 60-80 turns for yor than even bothering doing much expansion beyond the first 1-2 colonies for several reasons:

• The smaller footprint makes it less likely that another race will see you & attack while you are most vulnerable
• By having the manufacturing base in place, you can send out more heavily loaded colony ships that need less post settlement assembly to get rolling
• O suspect this will allow research to be kicked back up a notch  towards catching up to everyone else by quickly building a few research planets
• Yor do not follow the same pop growth/cap mechanicsas non-synthetic races
• I think the rush on mfg starbases is maybe also beneficial by generating massive industrial capability to expand from too.
• In all honesty, I probably would have been a little better off by taking a more split industry/research balance... but I don't think significantly.  Settling a third world to start with some research buildup probably would have put me in a better position going forward, but I could have been cranking out a few tiny populated colomy ships by 61.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wh4ewhcfe9ts8mx/0.61%20culture%20hackishfix.zip?dl=0

Playing yor like a non-synthetic race will cripple you (if you are lucky!).  Playing a non-synthetic race like a synthetic will do the same.  The potential dark horse from nowhereffect makes this strategy a  very interesting aternaticw to some of the functioing yor ones already discussed elsewhere

Yea, I wasn't trying for anything but "spit out a constructor every turn by turn 60".

I tend to rush towards tourism while churning out crap cheap hulls carrying .5mil yor to any planet I can find & setting them to full manufacturing tasked with assembly till they have several mil & are good to start building.

On the upside, I have a larger footprint when the rocketpack kicks in & massive income as soon as tourism is enabled.  On the downside, that early leg is extremely precarious in that almost any snag can be crippling.
I usually so a research world as my second or third colony too.
I think that I might have to do a bit of experimenting to blend the two strategies better now that I see the other path.

Yes and no.  Even during a Beta test, devs have different modes of time-crunch.  (This list is not complete; it's just a sampling.)

• Major features mode.  Of the Alpha 0.31 core game engine that mostly worked, there were perhaps 20 known placeholders implicitly labeled "TODO".  (all integers are strictly pulled out of my, um, fundament) Stardock has delivered ~8 of them, and they're working on the 9th and 10th.  After that, they'll ... acknowledge your new issues, append them to their master list, table them all, and work on the 11th and 12th major features.  It's not that they don't care; it's that their time is already fully committed.
• You can flag balance issues during this phase, but it's probably stuck behind 8 more major features and hundreds of other balance issues that they've already enqueued.
• Don't be discouraged if there's a lengthy gap between when you complain and when they appear to respond.  They're busy.  They remember everything.
• All major features done.  Balance issues now get addressed, roughly in queue order (sorted by descending priority, however they judge that).  This can take a while to trickle down to your pet peeve.
• All major balancing done.  They think they've fixed the top 20 highest-priority queue items ... but we raise new gripes about their fixes.  Anyways, around this phase we finally seriously play to find imbalances that we can exploit.  (N.B. One great way to convince a dev that an imbalance needs attention is ... to play against him in live multiplayer during a Beat the Devs community game day, and use it to kick his butt.)  Turnaround between community issues and new patches finally gets quick(er).

Pointing out imbalances is one of the roles of a Beta, but not the only one, and its priority changes as the dev team passes major milestones.  Right now, it's surely low(er)-priority, for the same reason you don't bother to fully tighten the first 3 lug nuts of a wheel while you're changing it.  Trust Stardock to log every issue we raise, and eventually address most of them.

Some issues are so clearly just placeholder-flaws that there's no real need to catalog their shortcomings in depth.  I'm pretty sure that combat (all of it) is one such.  Don't expend too much energy to tell a dev that her placeholder needs replacing.

If you feel so strongly about it, hit the xml files, find a solution that you think is good in play without being overbalanced & share.  The two files you are looking for are:

• StarbaseModuleDefs.xml  This file contains the bonus's and effects applied by starbase modules
• StarbaseDefs.xml  It looks like this is either the basic starbase you get from "create starbase" or a bit of legacy leftovers not fully phased out

To begin with, with comparisons to real world stuff a carrier would be better. I definitely want realism applied to starbases. I also think that star bases should be as viable as any other strategy, if for any other reason as to make small races more powerful. As far as anything I think less advanced stuff should not work as good as more advanced stuff. I'm not saying that there should be a star base ever so powerful that no ships can ever take it down ever. More importantly is can the air play against this stradegy effectively.

How come everyone is against the idea of a strong/fortified starbase? Its a huge and slow "expensive" target. Id rather see it give a hell of a fight after 40 turns of building, then it to be destroyed by a ship that toke only 1 turn...

Currently it doesnt apply to any real life or fictional physics (things like the point of approach and etc.), it just disappears.... Id be scared living on one of them GC3 stations, where flushing the toilet might even take it apart

Also if a ship pops up on sensors going straight for the station to apply its transversal velocity, it still need to reach that point first...
Until then, I reckon a massive space station with room for a massive array of weapons will make short work out of any fast moving tiny ships already pinpointed 3+ turns away.

Unless it applies tactics like long ranged weapons, kamikaze nuke, carrier, cloak etc. 

Have you put in any thought to how much space a hex might represent? There is no way in hell that a starbase could hit probably any target at 3 hexes away. (of course 3 hexes might be a little closer, I dont know how many AU the center of one hex is from another. off the top of my head... but assuming 10au per hex just for this math) That would be like trying to shoot at Jupiter from the Sun, thats 30 au away, if your not familiar with an au  its 150,000,000 km. So you want your weapons to fire about 2,796,170,355 miles. Yikes, I know this is the future, but really, I doubt you could hit a planet almost at those distances. (not to mention there is no way for kinetic weapons, or missle weapons to make it that far in a reasonable time frame. Even a laser traveling at the speed of light would take a little over 4 hours to reach that far assuming it could) So for someone wanting "realism" you sure didnt do any math...

There are several issues with this:

1. Tiles on the game map represent 'adjusted parsecs,' which from a post by Draginol (Frogboy) we know represent ~10 light-seconds to ~10 real-world parsecs of distance (though I suspect that the upper bound was meant to be 1 parsec rather than 10), and that the actual size of an 'adjusted parsec' is dependent upon the amount of mass present.
2. Based on how the map is formed, we can assume with a reasonable degree of safety that the smallest tiles are those in which planets and stars are found, followed by those tiles which are around tiles in which planets and stars are found. We can also safely assume that the tiles which are around but do not contain planets and stars are of a dimension on the order of several light-minutes, as planets are always separated from their stars by at least 1 map tile but normally not any more than that.
3. The average dimension of a map tile seems likely to be on the order of at least a light-month or a light-year, as if it were any less we could expect to see high tens to hundreds, if not more, of map tiles on the shortest line between any two stars, especially for stars in the neighborhood of Sol.
4. There are no known weapons available to the playable species in the Galactic Civilizations universe whose projectiles or emissions propagate any faster than the speed of light.
5. Ships can easily have 3 tiles worth of sensor range, so there's no reason to assume that the station's target would be unaware of the station's presence, and as such, if the station is known to be hostile and it is known that a weapon system exists which is effective at whatever range is locally represented by 3 map tiles, and especially if this station or its controlling faction is known to have access to that weapon, there is no reason to assume that the station's potential targets would not be engaging in evasive maneuvers.

Putting all of this together, we see that, using weapon systems which are known to exist and are used by playable species in the Galactic Civilizations universe, a station would need to predict a target's location anywhere from 30 seconds to more than 90 years in the future in order to score a hit with beam weapons, with it being probable that the station would need to know the target location several months to several years in advance on average to hit a target 3 tiles distant with a beam weapon, and likely needs considerably better predictive capabilities to hit targets 3 tiles distant with non-beam weapons. Worse, since all known weapon systems available to playable species appear to propagate at no greater than luminal velocities and each turn represents a week of time (at least based on GCII), the maximum range that such a weapon could cover in a single turn is 0.006 real-world parsecs, which would appear to be well under the average dimension of in-game map tiles as such an average dimension would imply that the shortest path from Sol to its nearest neighbor should be on the order of a thousand tiles long.

Beyond those objections, there is no reason to believe that any of the weapons in the Galactic Civilizations universe are effective at even the absolute minimum range suggested by Draginol's post for a 3-tile separation between the station and the target, as all combat in the Galactic Civilizations series has thus far been shown to occur at ranges which can be crossed by beam weapons virtually instantaneously, all of which appear to propagate at the same speed as the game's lasers, and moreover none of the missile or mass driver weapons propagate at a velocity which appears to be any greater than a fraction of the speed of light. This suggests that the weaponry and targeting systems of the Galactic Civilizations universe are not up to the task of engaging targets more than a fraction of a light-second distant.

As far as the subject of whether or not a station should be able to defend itself against minor attacks, I would say yes, and with enough research and construction invested into defenses it should probably be capable of resisting moderate attacking forces, presuming those forces are at a technological and power level similar to that of the station. Thus, if a station takes a cruiser-sized slot of fleet space, I would want a station with 'average' to 'heavy' defensive upgrades to be capable of resisting attacks by cruiser-level opponents at the same technological level, and possibly something a bit more than that if the station's defenses were heavily upgraded (and it might be appropriate for the more militarized stations to be a bit more defensively powerful than the less-militarized stations, such as culture starbases, are). If the station defenses are at much less than that level of competence, then station defenses become pointless as the station is a liability in any fleet engagement and it becomes far better to simply use a local defense fleet to protect the station rather than wasting time and upgrades on the station itself, while if the station defenses are at much more than that level of competence it has too much potential of becoming an unassailable location when the station is part of a decent fleet.

While it is true that a station should have hours to days of warning of the approach of hostile vessels detected 3 tiles away, it is not necessarily true that the information gathered is sufficiently useful to engage the vessels upon reaching effective weapon ranges. We know that Galactic Civilizations hyperdrives work by warping space in some way, and perhaps this prevents the collection of sufficiently accurate position and velocity information for use in targeting an approaching vessel - after all, we don't know if the sensor technology within the game is able to distinguish between a ship moving at a speed of 0.1c while warping distances by a factor of 20 and a ship which is moving at a speed of 0.2c while warping distances by a factor of 10, or if we can distinguish either of those ships from one moving at 10 mph and warping distances by a factor of 1.34X10^8. Nor do we know how accurately the map-level sensors can determine the distance and direction to a detected target - for all we can tell from the map, the long-range sensors in the Galactic Civilizations universe may actually have worse angular resolution the closer a target comes to the sensor, as the direction in which a vessel on an adjacent tile can be found is known no more accurately than to within one sixth of a sphere (or perhaps a circle) by looking at the game map, but the direction to a target two tiles distant is known to within about one-twelfth of a sphere (or perhaps a circle), and so on, and based on the information within the game it would not be possible to say with any certainty whether this is a limitation of the in-game representation or a limitation of the sensor or an advantage of warping space for effectively superluminal travel rates, and, assuming that this is a limitation of the sensor or an advantage of hyperdrives, we don't know if it's possible to accurately back out the necessary information based on what the sensors detect, and even if the effective weapon ranges are as low as a few hundred kilometers even small errors in determining the direction to a target can turn shots into clean misses.

We also know that all (or at least almost all) map-level movement is performed while the hyperdrive is engaged, but we do not know how close ships come to planets, stations, and other ships before disengaging the hyperdrive, nor do we know how warped space in the Galactic Civilizations universe interacts with projectiles and electromagnetic radiation (e.g. lasers or radar pulses) attempting to reach a target producing the distortion effect. We don't know if ships with hyperdrives engaged are effectively immune to detection by the kinds of sensors used for combat targeting or if ships are forced to disengage their hyperdrives long before they reach engagement ranges because emissions from targeting radars crossing the spatial distortions generated by active hyperdrives at close to combat ranges hit whatever is inside the distortion with the force of a supernova (though this last is likely not the case). We don't know how quickly ships move from the range at which they disengage hyperdrives to combat ranges, other than that the time period in which this happens is no greater than perhaps a third or a half of the time period represented by 1 move action, or if the ships can make use of their hyperdrives over short (but greater than combat) ranges to screw with targeting. We don't know when evasive maneuvers, spoofing, jamming, or other ways to evade weapons fire becomes effective; possibly ships intent on engaging a target can approach under sufficiently heavy jamming to prevent a target's sensors from providing an adequate firing solution until both sides are well within the effective ranges of the weapon systems under ideal circumstances, perhaps the station's weapons have a lower effective range against the attacker than the attacker's weapons do against the station (not terribly unlikely, as the station is a large and relatively immobile target whereas the attacker is probably smaller and is likely designed for greater maneuverability than the station).

We simply do not know enough about the capabilities of the weapons, the sensors, the ships, and the stations in Galactic Civilizations to judge whether or not a station can make use of its knowledge that a hostile ship is approaching from a point 3 tiles away to prepare a warm welcome for that ship, nor do we know enough about how hyperdrives work (or are used) in Galactic Civilizations to say whether or not real-world sensors could be used to prepare the same warm welcome on final approach to combat ranges. Without knowing this kind of information, we really cannot say whether or not a station that detects an approaching hostile ship has 3 nanoseconds or 3 days to point the guns in the right direction with enough accuracy to hit the approaching vessel, or even whether or not it has the information to do more than put "General Quarters 2 o'clock Tuesday" on the schedule.