Re: Base - Space station
 

I also recently discovered the tactic of making Base Carriers. Instead of giving them guns, I give them a shipyard and a bunch of fighter bays. Then I build them near important planets and at warp points. Fighters in bays don't get coutned against teh 2000 units in orbit, the fighters can move during combat so the enemy can't just run out of the base's range and wait for 30 turns to end, and it can replace lost fighters on its own. Hehe. Too bad they take so dan glong to build...

------------------
Compete in the Space Empires IV World Championship at www.twingalaxies.com.

Re: Base - Space station
 

I use bases for two things:

1) Maintaining a presence in no-planet systems. I put a base (with a shipyard on it) in nebula/storm/asteroid systems so I can keep an eye on what's going on in them. Just to make sure the enemy doesn't sneak up on me. (Obviously, this doesn't work in black hole systems, but the AI doesn't deal with those very well anyway...)

2) Remote miners! You can fit 14 remote miners/farmers/extractors on a battlestation, and mine the heck out of an asteroid field (or uncolonized planet). Works like a charm, and pays for itself within a few turns if you're mining a reasonably rich (>100% resource) asteroid field/planet.

Re: Base - Space station
 

In some of the really long and drawn out games of SE3, my friend and I used to hide shipyard ships in storms deep inside each other's territory (use cloaks to get there). Then we'd build bases and other things like that inside the storm. Every once in a while a big fleet would pop out of the storm and start ravaging a system way behind the front lines. Hehe. When you went to attack there'd be four or five starbases protecting the ships and no one had shields so you really didn't want to get in range of the stations' guns. This only really works if you turn off star destroying weapons.

------------------
Compete in the Space Empires IV World Championship at www.twingalaxies.com.