I'm trying to play the base campaign again before I get into the retribution campaign, but nothing I've tried so far has worked.

When running the default version of the game [with or without the DLC], colony improvements are unbalanced and don't function the way they should, and the tech tree is completely broken. After that I tried running GC3 Classic with no DLC, since I figured that would be the most compatible. I was right for the most part as all the bugs were fixed and the campaign ran smoothly with the game reverted, but there was one catch: Starbases required administrators to build, and there's no way of obtaining more because administrators don't exist in this version of the game. I was only able to build 4 starbases total in the Arcea campaign, which isn't even enough to mine all the available resources on the map, let alone defend my colonies against the constant Drengin onslaught.

I tried working around it by using the mapdefs files to increase the base administration count , but those files only affect sandbox games and I can't find seem to find any files pointing to the campaign maps. Anybody got ideas?