If this is a universal position among players it indicates that military SB's need an upgrade from Galciv II. Did people find them useful, honestly? If useful, efficient?
Military starbases, especially highly-upgraded military starbases, could be useful, but the problem was that you had to fight within the area of effect, and so you'd probably spend great sums of money and many turns of planetary production building construction ships to create this one area where you get all these great bonuses and then you'd find that you actually get to make use of those bonuses maybe once or twice in the entire game. The only thing about them which was generally useful was that they could give a speed bonus of a couple of points to ships that started their turn inside the starbase's area of effect, and if I'm not mistaken that speed bonus stacked if multiple starbases all covered the same tile, so you could effectively create jump points where you might get to move an extra 8 moves or something like that the next turn if you planned where you ended your movement correctly, and if you wanted to you might be able to create highways like this so that you could make better use of those factory planets in your empire's heartlands better, rather than continually moving the factories up towards the border while converting the backfield over to lab and purse worlds, and you could make it so that you could relocate fleets relatively quickly from one side of your empire to the other if necessary, but that was about the only long-term benefit the military starbase offered.
Starbase defense modules were never particularly worthwhile in GCII because, all else being equal, would you rather spend a construction ship getting +5 beam attack on your starbase or +10% research to every planet in its area of effect? My fleets typically provide adequate defense for my starbases, and if they don't, the defensive modules aren't likely to make that much of a difference. Maybe Battle Stations I or a couple of the basic weapon modules early on to repel minor aggression, but aside from that, why bother? They cost planetary production turns, money to pay for the military production or the rush purchase of the ships, maybe extra time if you're building the construction ships far from the station, more money for several of the combat modules, and all for something that should never see any significant amount of combat. The time and money spent on combat upgrades for starbases would normally be better spent on building a fleet or two of ships to defend that starbase; after all, the fleet is at least as effective and can be relocated when the threat passes or if needed elsewhere. The resources invested in the starbase modules are stuck wherever the starbase is, and just make the starbase more expensive to replace if it's lost. On top of that, a lot of the starbase defenses were on an entirely separate branch of the tech tree from ship weapons and ship defenses, and since starbases cannot really defend planets and transports or attack enemy fleets, that branch of the tech tree was more of a luxury for when you have nothing better to do than a practical line of research. Why bother researching Starbase Fortification when fleets were better defenses and isolated starbases were doomed anyways? Especially when in order to get the full benefits of the line of research you needed something like 20 construction ships to install everything in the first place. With ships, you can install only the best stuff, but with starbases you have to install everything, and even worse is that some of it's restricted to being installed in the order you unlocked it - don't worry, boys, I'm sure that Battle Stations I with its 1/1/1 0/0/0 attack and defense bonuses will be so effective against modern cruisers with their 25/15/20 20/20/18 attack and defense scores, and I'm sure it's worth installing it before we get around to mounting the Starbase Invulnerability Field Generator with its 16/16/16 defense rating or the Starbase Heavy Blaster Array with its 10/0/0 attack rating (the second two modules are made up, or if they're real modules, their statistics are made up).
Turns are a week long, so you only need to know how far your target moves in a week and with that and the knowing the speed the target has traveled while under observation is likely the speed it will remain at so extrapolating isn't hard.
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If you want to hit it, particularly if you want to hit it at extreme range, you need to know its course and speed with a lot of accuracy, especially if the target is moving quickly or if a lot of time elapses between firing the weapon and the potential time when your weapon's projectile can strike the target. A week is also a lot of time in which you can change course if you so desired, and even if you aren't going out of your way to conceal your end destination, you don't need to follow the baseline course exactly.
Beyond that, if you noticed, the speed numbers that I gave previously all have an effective travel speed of twice the speed of light; that was part of the point of the examples. You might know the effective map-level speed, but you don't necessarily know what this translates into when they enter the station's firing range and disengage the hyperdrive, and the velocity at which the ships are moving relative to the station when they enter the station's effective range is what is important if the station's weapons are to hit them, whereas the apparent strategic level speed is useful only for knowing roughly when the ships will get here. We don't even know whether or not ships with active hyperdrives need to have velocities aligned with the direction of propagation of the spatial distortion created by the hyperdrive or if Galactic Civlizations sensors can tell where within the spatial distortion a ship can be found, or if ships have to be in certain positions relative to the spatial distortion their hyperdrives create. If the distortion is a sphere 200 miles in diameter and the ship can be found anywhere inside of that, the distortion is still well under the minimum dimension of a map tile so there's plenty of space for a lot of fleets, and even knowing the exact path and speed of the distortion will only get your weapons fire within maybe 100 miles of the ship creating it if you cannot figure out where within the distortion the ship happens to be.
[quote who="kestlstw" reply="51" id="3514730"]
Key bit #1, GalCiv sensors are very accurate, you can always find your target with another fleet, there is no uncertainty. Key bit #2 you can always force engagement with an enemy fleet in the same tile so no matter how the hyperdrive distorts space it does not disrupt the function of sensors and everyone has a system that will allow their weapons to engage whether in or out of superluminal velocity.
The battle space might possibly be within a spatial distortion, with the effect that the battle as a unit moves at superluminal velocities, but the ships engaged are not moving at superluminal velocities, or even high fractions of the speed of light, relative to one another, as beam weapons propagate between ships significantly more rapidly than the ships themselves move. However, I would judge it unlikely that the battles take place within massive spatial distortions as the Fleet Warp Bubbles technology suggests that ships in a fleet typically generate their own distortions rather than there being one giant distortion containing the full fleet. More likely, both fleets disengage their hyperdrives before engaging in battle; presumably, since fleets are always capable of forcing battle if they attempt to occupy the same map tile, there is some means of making it too dangerous to keep the hyperdrive engaged and run away (and some justification for a device capable of disrupting the function of hyperdrives enough to force a battle exists given that there is a station module in GCII that can reduce the speed of hostile ships within the entire area of effect of the station; it's not too hard to imagine that warships might carry a version of that device with a more localized effect that more completely disrupts hyperdrive function, which is usable as long as the ships can come sufficiently close to the target), or perhaps all the navies in the game mandate that their officers always accept battle when offered, regardless of the matchup, or perhaps it's just a restriction of the game engine to prevent the players from having to waste time running down every last fighter and surround it with fleets on every adjacent tile to force a battle. And if the justification for the ability to always force a battle with a fleet that can reach a tile containing another player's fleet is that there's a device that disrupts hyperdrives, all that the sensors need to do is get a ship close enough to use the device. Depending on just how close this hypothetical device needs to be to function is not clear, of course, but the upper bound on how good the map-level sensors are at pinpointing targets is the same as it was from just looking at the map - the sensors need to be able to locate the target to within 1 map tile. If the map level sensors can do more than that, we cannot tell. It's entirely possible for the ships to have a separate sensor suite for closing with targets and engaging in combat than the sensor suite which is used for collecting map-level information; it may even be likely, as to the best of my knowledge adding more sensor components has no effect on combat performance despite presumably making it possible to burn through jamming more easily if the sensor components added were the same components used for targeting.
