Well, works for me. I'm dropping the ability to escort ships in the area of effect, because it was doing per ship, and I wanted per fleet. And it did seem like just too many fighters.  So planets, yards, and bases get these guardian fighters. 

Arguably the fighters have rudimentary hyperdrives that require frequent refueling, and there is a refuel network in the area of effect coordinated by the MSB. 

Doesn't really help. If you go for the prearranged escort justification, you need to have fighters that are as fast as the fleet they accompany or they'll slow it down, or you're looking at continually dropping one set of escorts and picking up a new set. If you go for the response force justification, you can use knowledge of the speed of the rudimentary hyperdrive to determine just how far off you need to be able to detect threats in order to get the fighters to right position in time for the engagement:

[threat detection radius] = [station's AoE radius] * [threat speed] / [fighter speed]

Since the speed you'd expect from a 'rudimentary' hyperdrive isn't any better than the minimum speed you can design into your ships (i.e. the speed you have without adding any hyperdrive components), and the speed of a threat can fairly easily be 5-10 times greater, you're looking at requiring a very large detection radius around the station. You can reduce this somewhat by claiming fighters are on patrol around the station, allowing you to use some number smaller than the station's AoE radius in the formula, but you're once again looking at having arbitrarily large fighter wings stationed at the starbase which aren't anywhere to be found if there aren't any friendly fleets in the region.

It also doesn't help with justifying the very low cost of fighters, whereas assuming that the fighters completely lack long-term life support and hyperdrives does help justify their very low costs somewhat.

Simplest explanation (if one is even needed...) would be that there's a non-combat short-range carrier stationed in the starbase that can hyper-hop the radius distance. It's not shown on the map because it's abstracted away as it doesn't take part in the action. It just brings in the fighters, hops away to safety, and comes back later for a pickup if the battle was won. All nice and tidy.

Its not, but I like your explanation too. At any rate, Joe mentioned the cheap cost of fighters, since this is a SB module, the cost can be front loaded into the module itself, as well as a increase in maintenance fee. Right now I have this module costing 3 credits per turn and costing 2 construction points (not to mention, its the third upgrade in a chain, so it takes 6 construction points to get it).

Does that feel fair to people, or should it be more/less.

Just to be clear:

Module A) Increases planet defense/resistance by 10%. Cost 2 points, 1 Credit per turn

Module  Increases planet defense/resistance to 20%. Cost 2 points, 2 Credit per turn

Module C) Adds 3 interceptors to planets, starbases, shipyards. (and maintains the 20% bonuses), costs 2 points, 3 Credits per turn

Let me know if you have thoughts on the cost.

I would also accept the concept of a new (old) kind of hyperdrive system that cannot actually enter hyperdrive essentially creating a one way corridor to the target destination. Once combat has ended they could be picked up by a civilian carrier. 

The only time I ever used military starbases in gal civ 2, was for the 'jump gate system', but for Gal civ 3. I haven't found any use for them.

Just a thought...

If we make it so that any fleet stationed on the same tile as the military starbase could be set to 'Overwatch', (rather then guard or sentry).

This 'Overwatch' would allow that fleet (assuming it had enough moves), to intercept any fleet you were at war with, that came within your influential borders.

Now I realise this idea has flaws. The one most notable of which comes to mind, is that if you had enough of these military starbases, you would in essence do away with the idea of a 'patrol' function, which I thought was missing in gal civ 2, as a kind of "get off my lawn" idea.

Plus the importance of balancing such an idea, so for example, keeping the standard influence border of a starbase (5 Hexes I think), but for military starbases, have some sort of 'area of effect' for this 'overwatch' ability, say 20-30 tiles. Do you think this would allow you to protect multiple planets (with a single starbase) or to create multiple starbase to create a 'front line' against an enemy civilization. 

But on the concept of a 'Overwatch' as a whole, what do you think?

Military SB's by themselves won't cut it and I also don't use them.  But if I could add all the military stuff to other SB's (like mining) then I'll use it.  Right now it's cheaper to place a mining SB and if it's destroyed just rebuild it with 1-X constructors.  I use fleets as the protection.

OK guys i did a test using UNLOCK and built a mil base fully upgraded.  It turns a mediocre fleet int a super fleet BUT god bless in a game that is a whole lot of tech's you normally would never research and a ton of modules.  might be worth a bit more experimentation.   Don't get me wrong, still think they need work but i was courious how good they could be if fullu upgraded and the become pretty potent but expensive.

Sorry, i was having so much fun blowing AI fleets up i forgot to write down numbers

Was that testing only one starbase? Would stacking multiple bases boost the effect?

Yes only one.  Believe the do stack but will need to do a test.

I used them all the time in GC2. They had bonuses to ships combat within their ZOC that were useful.  The MSB in GAC3 are currently not worth building.

But in GAL Civ2 I would just have my fleet take out the SB and all bonus is lots.  Only the AI ignored the military SB's.  Only way to make military SB's good is to have them cover a very large range where an attacking fleet can be intercepted before they destroy the SB.  Or have the military SB's extremely strong where it actually takes a more advanced fleet to destroy it.  Otherwise they simply aren't cost effective.

There are 25 modules specifically for military starbases, and another 43 generic modules (and you won't always be able to or need to build all of the generic modules, but I'll count them all anyways). Therefore, at worst, I need 68 construction modules to fully build a military starbase. Each construction module costs 27 manufacturing; that's 1836 manufacturing points. By the time I can fully upgrade a military starbase, I ought to be able to build huge-hulled ships with max tech components; let's compute the cost of an example design:

5 Nightmare Torpedoes costing 22 capacity and 128 manufacturing each, 2 Zero Point Armor plates costing 16 capacity and 161 manufacturing each, 2 Invulnerability Field generators costing 10 capacity and 259 manufacturing each, 2 Arreon Missile Defense systems at 13 capacity and 198 manufacturing each, and 3 Stellar Folders at 20 capacity and 136 mass each, for a total cost of 2284 manufacturing and 248 required capacity for components; toss in the hull and that's 2716 manufacturing.

The minimum cost of a fully-upgraded military starbase is roughly two thirds that of a Huge-hulled ship equipped with the kinds of components which are available at the point when you can fully upgrade a military starbase when that Huge-hulled ship for some reason has only the base hull capacity to play with. Now, granted, you're not just going to be floating construction modules out to the station; at minimum, you need to pay for the hull (if cargo, then that increases the cost per point to 69, which increases the overall cost for 68 construction modules to 4692, though you can reduce this by stacking multiple cargo modules on the same cargo hull rather than getting a cargo hull per construction module). This is still an overall manufacturing cost comparable to 1.5 similarly-advanced Huge-hulled ships designed to fit within the base capacity of a huge hull (or just 1 if we double up on the construction modules). Even if we put 4 Hyperdrive Pluses and a Construction Module on each cargo hull, we're only looking at a total manufacturing cost of ~7500, equivalent to ~3 similarly-advanced Huge-hulled ships designed to fill the base hull capacity; this is a small and not particularly advanced fleet by this stage of the game. Even if we put 3 Warp Drives (base of 13 actions per turn) and a Construction Module on each Cargo hull, we're only looking at a cost of ~12000 manufacturing for 68 of these ships, or approximately ~4.5 of the similarly-advanced Huge-hulled ships designed for the base hull capacity (there is not, incidentally, any real point in going for Stellar Folders with the cargo hulls given that we want to keep the total capacity required for each of the designs presented similar; switching to Stellar Folding from Warp Drives increases the cost per ship from 180 to 341 and has no effect on the vessel's movement rate while only saving 8 capacity, modified by any drive capacity requirement reductions you have).

Even being very generous to the military starbase (counting the quality-of-life improvements on the construction ships towards the station cost without discount, having only one construction point per construction ship, using a huge-hulled ship which is similarly-advanced but isn't taking advantage of the capacity bonuses your faction should have by this point in the game), a military starbase doesn't cost any more than a handful of similarly advanced ships do. If we're being more reasonable, it probably costs something more in line with the cost of one similarly advanced ship. Given that fully-upgraded military starbases roughly double the power of each friendly ship within their area of effect, I do not see making the military starbases more powerful on their own as either necessary or reasonable. I also do not view it as at all appropriate for any starbase to be capable of engaging a similarly-advanced nearly-full-scale fleet without supporting units while still having a reasonable chance of surviving the encounter unless you also take away the starbase's ability to be supported by fleet units.

The problem that the military starbase has is not that its bonuses are insufficiently powerful (the first ones you add, sure, but not by the point it's fully upgraded) so much as that they're not necessary (why build a starbase to help my fleet out when my fleet already easily wins each engagement?), and to a lesser extent that the way the bonuses are backloaded rather than frontloaded makes it difficult to use military starbases offensively. Plus there's the issue of whether or not I want to bother investing in something that's only going to be useful for a handful of turns in a game lasting several hundred; the way the game's wars work, you're usually only looking at stable frontier over long time periods when you're at peace with your neighbors.

The problem is I will need dozens or 100+ of these military SB's all over the map.  My one fleet does cost more than a single military SB but it also never loses to that military SB so therefore even if the cost is just 10% it's a wasted 10%.

Like I said the AI is too dumb to take out the SB giving you that big bonus but when you fight the AI what is the first thing you destroy?  The bonus giving SB of course, especially since you know it won't cost you any damage (or very little).  Your raw cost figures were nice but not relevant.  Unless that SB has a chance to survive OR actually deliver that bonus to your fleets it's a waste.

A few things spring to mind.

1) The cost of 1 huge hulled ship is, presently, 1 turn. Forget the manu cost, as it's irrelevant; any half-decent player can make every planet pump out 3k+ a turn and so produce any ship in 1 go. The cost of the fully-upgraded military starbase is, if we use huge-hull constructors with 5 construction modules, 5 turns. 

2). Those huge-hull ships have 500 hit points each which can be increased with tech and equipment. The MSB is capped at 200. 

3) MSB range, even with the extender modules, is currently miniscule compared to even mid-game ship movement rates, making them useless for anything aside from buffing planet defense fleets.

Now, I'm inclined to agree with Joe that actually, the combat bonuses from MSBs are more than sufficient. You get over 100% increase to every combat stat on ship in it's range. This is an enormous bonus. If the average ship is 50% weapons/armour, then this is equivalent to a 50% mass increase, which effectively multiplies with other mass increases. MSBs do not need more bonuses within their area of effect.

However, the short area of effect of SBs in relation to the movement of late-game ships makes them useless; the ease with which player-designed fleets mince AI-designed fleets makes the bonus unnecessary; and their comparatively pitiful staying power to their high time-construction cost all make them an exceedingly poor investment right now.

This is not a problem with MSBs. It is a problem emerging from other balance issues. Those balance issues are:

1) Rampant over-production that makes ship manu costs a joke

2) Rampantly over-powered engines that makes their area of effect a joke

3) Poor AI ship design and fleet composition that ensures the player can pretty much always win battles (especially the AI fleets being limited to 1 attack per turn) which means additional bonuses are not required.

Just about the only area where military star bases are under-powered in my eyes is their static hit points. A small increase in HP per module to allow a high-end MSB to stand toe-to-toe with one or two huge hulls, to prevent expensive investments being taken out by lone wolf Large hulls, combined with needed fixes in the above three areas, would make them much more attractive.

Escort fighter capacity isn't currently being used for anything.

It would be fairly simple to create an escort fighter blueprint and have military starbases add X of them to fixed installations in their radius...systems, other starbases, shipyards.

The kicker is that these wouldn't be fighters...they would be system defense boats. Heavily gunned, not equipped for interstellar travel. Make them small or medium hulls. You could use of the existing defensive blueprints to keep it simple.

That would create a real incentive to kill the starbase rather than hack through a squadron of state of the art gun boats repeatedly.

Then station a fleet at the starbase. I cannot kill the starbase without going through at least that one fleet, and that one fleet is ~twice as strong as the ships in it are supposed to be. "Solving" the vulnerability issue by making the starbases essentially invulnerable (because you require a more advanced fleet to kill the starbase; stack a fleet on a starbase which can already handle a fleet of ships more advanced than the station is and the stations become nearly unkillable) is a bad solution to something that isn't much of an issue and doesn't do anything at all for the issues that the station actually has - namely, that the stations are difficult to use (due to the small area of effect relative and due to the backloaded bonuses), that the stations are currently unnecessary, and that the time in which a military starbase is useful is very limited because the war won't stick around in its area of effect all that long. Making the starbase harder to kill helps these issues how?

I have no objection to making a starbase able to survive lone raiders or other very low force commitments; that, to me, is reasonable. But to demand that the destruction of a starbase requires a more advanced fleet to attack the starbase is simply ridiculous, especially since the player (and the computer) is actually, you know, allowed to allocate fleet assets to defend the starbase by fighting in the same action as the station, and since the fleet assigned to the station is benefiting from the station's bonuses, the attacker probably needs to commit more than just 1 equivalent ship per defending ship stationed at the starbase.

Only 5 construction modules per Huge-hulled construction ship? By the time you can build Huge hulls, you can easily have:

• A Hyperion Shrinker giving roughly +50% hull capacity (10% base, +5% per level; built adjacent to an Elerium Defense Shield for 3 levels, an Antimatter Power Plant for another 2 levels, and a Preparedness Center or the two basic planetary defense structures - military academy and planetary defense system - for another two levels, you'll have a total of +45% hull capacity from the Shrinker, and you can more or less guarantee you'll manage to set this up as long as Antimatter and Elerium exist on the map)
• A hull capacity bonus of up to 50% from specializations you have to go through to get to Huge hulls
• You may also have deposits of Helios Ore at +5% hull capacity per deposit or had the Design Revolution event at least once with the option of taking +10% hull capacity per event

You can fairly easily be looking at a Huge hull with 500+ capacity when it first becomes available; even if the only hull capacity bonus you have is from the Hyperion Shrinker, you're still looking at something like 375 capacity (362.5 if the Hyperion Shrinker has only 7 levels like the one in the bullet, 375 or more if you can get at least one more level onto the Shrinker). If you're going to be using Huge-hulled construction ships, you may as well start by putting 7 construction modules on the hull; that's only 315 capacity (without Transport Specialization), leaving you with ~50 or more capacity for quality-of-life improvements like Warp Drives (room for 3 even without size reduction, giving a respectable speed of 13 + bonuses to the construction ship) even at the low end of the possible hull capacities.

If you've gone all out for capacity increases, you're more likely looking at a 500-capacity Huge hull (and may be looking at something with more capacity, depending on how good of a spot you found for your Shrinker and how lucky you've been with getting Design Revolutions and Helios Ore), which'll fit 10 full-size construction modules and leave you 50 capacity for QoL components, or 14 reduced-size construction modules (Transport Specialization) with 59 capacity left over for QoL components. That's ~2 turns of construction to get every or almost every module specifically for the military starbase (and frankly, I wouldn't miss the four modules affecting the strategic and tactical speeds of ships too much, and if the Military Starbase modules work like the Economic Starbase modules, I won't miss the Sector Defense Grid that much either since it's only another 10% to each attack and defense score over what the preceding module gave), or only 1 turn of construction if you've gotten the doubled construction points bonus from the Pragmatic tree.

By the time you have huge hulls, the cost of the military starbase's exclusive modules can be as little as 1 shipyard-turn of construction time, and completely building out a 68-module station can be as little as three shipyard-turns of construction time, and the designs as given have sufficient capacity beyond the construction modules to allow the vessels to be reasonably fast (13+ moves per turn, possibly better with drive mass reduction tech or speed bonuses, which is not great for late-game ships but is still reasonable even on the larger map sizes unless you're literally sending the ship halfway across the map or something like that) and have more than the minimum range.

You set your huge hull at Base capacity with no increase. I mirrored that. And for the full bonus, you're still looking at 3 turns as opposed to 1 for a ship that is now vastly more powerful than the fully decked out MSB. 

Besides, the point stands. Msbs are crippled due to other imbalances more than their integral weaknesses.

You know this is not how things work.  My fleet with their super engines can move in, kill the SB and move out all in one turn.  There is nothing forcing me to fight that fleet first.  And what you are proposing means you have to have a huge fleet next to every MSB out there.  In that case why even have the MSB with all those fleets around?

To buff the attendant fleet.

The point of the MSB is to complement fleets, not to replace them. Think of a fortress. With no one defending, it's helpless. It's  a massive force multiplier, but not a force in itself.

Have you never noticed that you can fleet ships up with a starbase, or that the starbase's logistical limit for defending ships is similar to end-game logistical limits for fleets? You station ships at the starbase, and that starbase cannot be engaged without involving those ships, and the way the battle mechanics work, the starbase isn't going to be attacked before those ships are destroyed. A fully-developed military starbase increases the power of an individual ship by such a degree that I probably only need about two thirds as many ships at the starbase as you send against it to be fielding a comparable force, and even in the end game that should be within reach given the logistical limit at the starbase and the attainable fleet logistics limits; if the starbase is also so powerful on its own that only a more advanced fleet actually stands a reasonable chance of killing the station, you've made the starbase effectively unkillable, especially by the end game when there are no more advanced fleets to be had.

You want to protect a starbase of any kind, including military, from similarly-advanced fleets? Put a fleet of your own on the station. Starbase defenses should be (but aren't really) capable of handling minor forces, like lone raiders or a small fleet (i.e. one that isn't close to the logistics limit, given that the starbase and the fleet are fielded by similarly advanced empires; if the small fleet is close to the logistics limit, then the starbase should be more advanced than the fleet in order for the starbase to be capable of taking the fleet on and expect victory, except in the very early stages of the game).

Military starbases are force multipliers, not fleet replacements. I need to have a fleet in the area anyways to protect whatever I'm trying to help defend with the military starbase, and if you're sending large fleets into the region to attempt to take it then the fleet(s) I have in the area need to be at least comparable in strength (so midsize fleets with starbase support or large fleets without) if it's reasonable for me to expect to contest your invasion; one of those fleets may as well be stationed at the starbase. As far as the fleet being out of position when you attack the starbase? That's not an issue; that's good baiting on your part, me being careless or overconfident, or me committing an inadequate amount of force to the region for the level of force that you've committed. It is entirely reasonable for you to be able to kill a military starbase with a big fleet if I've made an error in my defensive deployments; if my defensive strategy relies on an asset like a military starbase, I should have to make certain that I provide that asset with an adequate level of protection for the threats to which it may be exposed, or there is no real cost to me making a mistake. "Oh dear, I sent the Fifth Station Defense Fleet too far away to return to its post at the end of this turn. Too bad military starbases are only effectively killable by more advanced fleets, or this mistake might have actually, I don't know, cost me something if my opponent tried to take advantage of it, rather than costing me nothing since the fleet isn't actually needed to defend the station."

What that means is you have to have a fleet for every MSB you have and not move that fleet.  That is unrealistic at best.  There is no way you can have a fleet at every MSB.

1. You only need a fleet at each starbase which is actively threatened or which you expect to be threatened in the near future, not every starbase. Beyond that, you have the option of deciding that a region is not important enough to commit (significant) forces into to protect the assets in the area if you feel that you don't have the available forces necessary to do both that and whatever else you wanted to do. Priorities are a thing, and if defending Nowheresburg V and the associated starbase(s) isn't high enough on the list for me to commit enough forces there to repel whatever you're sending, well, that's too bad for Nowheresburg V and the associated starbase(s). My assets should not be immune to attack even when I fail to provide adequate protection, but with what you're asking, the starbases at the least more or less would be.
2. You can move the fleet out, you just need it to come back before your turn ends or you expose the starbase. Same deal with any garrison - keeping it on station keeps its home safe, but prevents you from making full use of the force thus committed. This is true even if you use interception fleets rather than starbases with garrison fleets; you need a certain minimum density of interception fleets, and you need them to be in the right places, or your fleets won't do anything for you. Beyond that, military starbases have a base game option to help deal with stationed fleets needing to be able to go out, intercept a target, and return - the Stellar Wake Generator, which halves the cost of moving through tiles in the area of effect. The failing is that the area of effect isn't large enough to matter a great deal, especially in the late game.

Besides which, if you're going to have a military starbase in the area, you at present must have at least one fleet nearby anyways if you're to see any real benefit from the military starbase.

The MSB has a limited effective range.  So here's your problem.  In order for you to get that bonus your fleet must be in the limited range of the MSB.  Outside of that hex your MSB is toast and outside of that force multiplier range the MSB is useless.  Now here's a simple scenario.  You're trying to defend against an invasion.  Let's say your MSB even guards the planet.  But now your fleet is stuck in the MSB hex.  As you yourself said it has to be there or else the MSB is toast.

As the attacker all I have to do is stay one hex out of its range.  With engines that easily exceed that range this is very easy to do.  Now we spent the same cost on the fleet but you spent another 25% on the MSB (probably more in reality).  So I have a second fleet 25% the size of our main fleets.  What do you do?  You are stuck because if you move to attack the second fleet the MSB is gone.  You don't want to risk having a smaller fleet even with the multiplier as that means you can lose your fleet.  And no you can't say your second fleet because this only assumes you have a greater production capacity.

Like Patton said fixed fortifications are a tribute to man's stupidity.  A MSB is nothing more then CG's version of the Maginot line.

Your final point of having a fleet nearby is not the say as being forced to keep the fleet in the same hex as the MSB.  And the second you move that fleet your MSB is dead.  You are 100% reactionary and have no initiative.

One more option can be a drive-disruption effect that slows enemy movement. I think 2-3 tiles' distance should make it balanced. Especially brutal, if you stack a lot of assist-type bonuses, letting your fleet tear the enemies up while they're mired down. You can say that having a secret frequency to tune your own ships' crud will immunize them while having this effect on hostiles.