Look I can't read this or make a joke or serious comment right now. So I'll say yes and no and maybe, your also no the right track!

DARCA.

Ok, maybe. I want the tried and true easy to do way again. But maybe maybe this will do as good...when the starports aren't vulnerable.

DARCA;)

I agree that the early game let's destroy the starport should be eliminated, I wonder what ideas have been floating around that office in Stardock about these things. They said they made them more defensive. I do hope that in the late game tedium of destroying an empire that they will completely surrender their space fairing goals once you have destroyed all their starports.

The inevitable doom of that civilization should be realized at that point. I wonder if a tick option in the game setup would allow the game to have ships be built on planets, sort of an easy mode or recommended for small / tiny maps.

I've been thinking of this some more...just to recap.

1. Have some shipbuilding capability on the planet, perhaps as a shipyard I have to build on a planet tile. Basically the GC2 way added back.

2. Let a planet sponsor multiple starports. 

As another thought...  Reduce the time necessary to construct a starport. I've been seeing about 3 turns to get one up and perhaps they should never take more than a turn to complete if the world has ANY manufacturing capability. I don't think you should be able to build one at all until then. (This requirement may already exist--haven't checked.)

I think any and preferably all of these options would make it more difficult to take out an opponent as well as temper the camp and blast strategy.

If  not always used say due to AI issues, then perhaps as game global options that human players could turn on/off for a particular game.

--David

I like them all and hope they do more than just "fix" the fragile nature of the starports...the more ways starports can be used and the more ways to build ships, the more strategies and counter-strategies that can come into play.  Eg, the mega factory world sponsoring multiple starports, hardened starports, starbase shipyard, or even only building on planet until you need the starports for the additional capacity.

--David

I like that--I can see the starports as the genesis of carriers. However, do you think they should be able to actually build new hulls?  I'm thinking no or very limited capability to build new hulls but they could be able to speed up repairs. Of course tiny hulls rarely survive.  Maybe carrier capacity could be tonnage based...swarms of tiny, a bunch of small, several troopships, a couple medium or a mix.

And what they're carrying could be shielded from detection so you never know what that carrier is about to unload.

That could also lead to a "Tender" or "Repair Ship" module that rushes repair of hit points for docked ships. Seems like there was such a thing for starbases in GC2, but I could be remembering something else.

--David

That may be what I'm remembering.

It may already do this, but just abstracting repair ability would be OK with me. Dock at a world or starbase and repair rate goes up a bunch as opposed to sitting idle in space.

--David

Already in and has been since they were introduced.

What do you mean? You want to make a fleet of starports? Why?

So you want starports to be able to build starbase modules? Then why would you ever build a starbase?

Will be there in beta, as shown in the latest dev stream.

I should have indicated simultaneous multiple sponsors... that did not appear to be the case in 3.1...

for parallelism in the queue and transparent fail-over/fall-back for build orders... features that you really do want in a hostile environment (real or virtual)

I think that starports should be a derivative class of starbase (they are all space stations of a sort) - so you start with either a 'general' starbase which you can specialize with the economic ring or the culture ring or you can start with a 'pre-specilized' starbase called a starport that you cannot specialize any further... To either kind you can add the 'common' offense/defense modules and/or the 'appropriate' mining module, etc...

As to why have starports and starbases - it's about the specialization... a starbase with a 'hanger' ring and/or a heavy weapons module becomes a battlestation, etc... on the back end it will actually make for better code maintenance, since both will derive from the same class... as for playability it will actually make it easier, again since they should come from a common class, playable object capabilities management will be simpler.

[I do hope they migrate the 'anchor' -> 'unanchor' -> 'move' -> 'reanchor' functionality to the 'general' starbase class - it adds a tactical wrinkle that should/could be interesting]

-David S.

The stardock moves because of how it was built. It was constructed from the planet and built to move away from the planet and hence it can move in general from original design. While starbases are constructed in space directly without the need nor designed to move in the first place. You can place better functionality on the base without designing it to be mobile.

Carriers would be a nice addition.  Either make it so that they can hold a certain amount of tiny ships or perhaps when you build a carrier you select a particular type ship they carry.  It would be a great element to add to your fleets.  Small carriers would have 1 bay, medium carriers 2, large carriers 3, huge carrier 4. 

Perhaps you could have bay modules that you select, just like you have weapons and defense and support modules.  So you could build modules such a repair drones, laser drones, missile drones and kinetic drones.  That way you could build a "support carrier" that has repair drones and serves as a mobile repair platform in the fleet.  Or you could just build full on attack carriers.

It would definitely lead to some interesting fleet strategy and tactical battle options.

Also, I fall on the side of not moving the starbases.  I do think that the strategy with those is picking the right location from the beginning.  Being able to move starbases seems like a "poor mans" terror star.

Carriers have been confirmed for quite some time. The devs have also talked about them a little in one of the live streams, but I don't remember which one. It probably was the second one, because that one was supposed to be about warfare, but I'm not certain.

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything, but my hair began turning grey four years ago. At least, that's when I first noticed it.

Also, don't call me "bro". I find that highly annoying.