Crusade: Early Starbases vs Ship Strength

It does seem a bit silly and low effort.  One simple constructor manages to instantly pop this indestructable fortress.  And the AI are fond of dropping them all over you, which is ultra annoying.

Eventually you'll tech up to the point of vaporizing them easily but early on the disparity is striking.

AI's settling on top of you and rush shipyards, which are also magically overpowered for defenses is equally annoying.

It would seem like both should pop far weaker and require some resources and time comparable to what has to go into the far, far weaker ships.

As it is, you may not need a bazillion constructors to spam starbases everywhere but since they're so easy to build and so little goes into improving them, that starbase spam will be as thoughtless and rampant as ever.

I think that there should be an option to capture starbases rather than shoot them down in the early (or even late) game.  How often in real life military campaigns did a fortress or fortification actually get completely destroyed in the course of battle (even in the post-modern artillery era)?  It's more likely that the fortress is capture and then reduced afterwards rather than it being destroyed in combat.  

Even with this patch, I still tend to bypass starbases in the Age of War as I don't usually have enough firepower to take acceptable casualties assaulting one.  Late game though, it is really trivial as Voqar says to just wipe them out (except usually by that point, there are far higher priority targets than starbases that you tend to leave them alone).  If you had the biggest gun in the galaxy, would you go after a starbase if you could take out Drengi the homeworld?

It really does feel that starbases are rarely so large a target that you would dedicate forces to defeat them.  I don't know what a good solution is (possibly capture, possibly spy sabotage), but I think there should be an indirect way of neutralizing starbases without having to expend the fleet trying to get to them.

I always wondered why my fleet attacks starbases at all. If I want to kill them, why not go grab a large rock or two and launch them at the base? It isn't exactly moving to dodge the rock, and if I send a few, or a big one, it will wipe the base out completely.

I think the initial starbase should be very easy to kill but it should also be possible to build tough starbases within 10-20 turns with a lot of resources and money.