As I suggested before starbases should be done in a modular fashion. Moreover I think they should have their own tech tree. There should be a military, cultural, economic and science path for one to follow.

I have a proposition:

a really huge ship capable of building frigates in forward battle. make it so rediculously expensive that its only viable when you have a whole economy created to support it. this would allow some viability in taking someone else's star, as you could create a forward defensive position. it just simply needs to be made so expensive, or detrimental in some way that its only useful for attacks that occur far outside the production/reinforcement range of your empire.

of course, if you want to be rediculous you could create an even more expensive, even more massive ship that can produce capitals... but thats kindof getting carried away.

this would make battles at stars far more viable, and if the gravity wells are increased to a large enough size, you might even have a two sided production battle with each side pumping out more and more units to send into the frenzy.

think like the carrier from homeworld, or even the mothership on occasion.

which is why there seriously needs to be a set of secondary objects.

While I really don't have anything to add that hasn't already be said, I'll put in my 2 cents.

Yes, something needs to be done with the Stars. Here they are, this wonderful thing that defines the cluster...and it's decoration. If you're going to have stuff like this, why not put other items that you'd normaly see in space? Black holes, nebula, etc. All you see as you're flying towards it in phase space is this '?' where you're going to end up. Why does it have to be colonizable? How about even just plain open space? Stuff could still be buildable there with some sort of new capital foundry ship that has to be resupplied by either runing back to a refinery or via trade ship. Probably not practical, esspecially with the ability to colonize almost every single gravity pocket, but still a thought.

NEways, back to the topic at hand. I do lke the idea of a star being harvesable, but I wouldn't say for a super weapon itself. Maybe for a band or lvl of tech that requires access to that type of resource. I peronally like the idea of the orbital reserch facility, but you can't build anything there, so you would need havester ships from a nearby system(s).

Like I said, not really anything new here, but stil 2 cents worth...here's your change.

Another option would be to put alien tech around the stars. Doing such a thing would force people to station fleets at the star(s) if they wish to control it/them.

I was not saying that bases around a star would be more powerful in terms of offence, just better equipped for defense since they have to have better equipment to deal with the different environment that they are in. As for cost, I'm all for having the cost be more then average considering all the obvious costs that would be needed to set up the said bases. But I do say that they should give you the ability to build bases around a star even if none of your "intelligent" commanders would build them because one thing is for sure, for every "intelligent" commander, there are many others who are either stupid, crazy, or want to have fun so they do strange things to try them out.

As for reasons to have things around stars, there are many things that can be done with this. Research stations, some sort of harvester that can collect solar winds and use the resulting materials in a usefull manner, or you could even have the ability to sort of "colonize" the star in that you can build large habitats in orbit around the star that basically either count as a planet (in terms of population and maybe production) or at least a chunk of a planet.

Also, I agree with the statement that you should also be able to do stuff in just empty space, after all even though there may not be materials there, it could be an advantage for you to hide some sort of shipyard there and so even if you get blitzed in a Pearl Harbor of the Future attack, you wont be outright dead.

Dead space should be used it is the biggest part of space. Think about having a inhibiter's in the middle of a phase lane and the attacking fleet has to get past it in order to move on the planet or use them to cover your retreat from a failed attack. Dead space stations and battles would add another layer to the game. Even if they have no economical bonuses you could have a forward base to launch raids agents your enemy. Stars are important and they should become a bigger part of the game.

One we really don't want. If you make building in deadspace possible, the game will really become tedious. To win you have to wipe out your opponent (granted, most will give up when victory becomes impossible, but some won't) If you have to go and secure every planet, and then go hunt down some random base....

you can have over a hundred planets in the universe, isn't that enough?

Although harvesting at a star would probably be a nice idea, maybe have the resource trade station send out solar harvesters or something. That way, blocking an enemies acces to the sun is still usefull, but not a deathblow or overly critical issue,as suggested in some of the above posts.

Here's a simple idea: Make trade ships actually trade between systems, and make the profit for interstellar trading very high. This way, players will need fleets at stars to interdict enemy's trade routes.

There are two major reasons the stars aren't badly in need of a fix:

The first is that the nature of stars as hubs to attack any of four planets gives the attacker enough of a fair chance to grab a planet and build a forward base so that there can be some really nice fleet battles. Because of this, the attacker has the most important advantage of all if the defender gives him the star: mobility. Defending four locations against a unified blow is impossible, and one victory allows the attacker to quickly rebuild before the defender can gather the strength to fight back. By making stars undevelopable, it encourages ship to ship battles, which are far more entertaining than platform building. The one thing I definitely want to see is an offshoot of this is a larger gravity well to fight in, however it shouldn't be enough larger to take away the aforementioned mobility advantage. Right now, I don't think that a stalemate is achievable for a serious length of time, but correct me if I'm wrong.

The other part is that the odds of two different systems being captured by two factions in an equivalent situation at roughly the same time are very small, so I don't see two equal empires endlessly trading blows. One would almost assuredly be able to attack before the enemy is ready/able to defend or have overwhelming force. Also, the winner of the battle around a star will have an experienced core to rebuild a fleet around, giving him a huge advantage in the next battle, and giving him a good shot at fleet superiority in his assault despite the transit time. If he has this advantage in his opponent's star system, the game's over.

Forgive me my essay.

EDIT: Oh, and the game is plenty complicated with the other civs and all factored in. I think dead space would just add dead time to the games. Anyway, dead asteroids serve most of the uses that dead space would, and they do it plenty well. Plus, given the general speed of the game, any of the outlying planets would serve brilliantly as a reinforcement factory, since without reconnaissance and 100 times the speed the ships have now a Pearl Harbor is impossible. If you want to kill an enemy, it'll have to be more of a Surigao Strait or Midway type victory, and after that the loser should at the very least be on the ropes.

With defense in depth from walls of guass guns, add in hardened zergling hordes of kodiaks and scouts to focus fire on attackers... attacking any of the turtle choke points off the star is currently not a guaranteed victory for an attacker.

Mind you, I'll grant that the AI is as yet simply predictable in B1, but I am suspecting that even in the next beta that turtling will still be a key strategy to winning. An aggressor without a mothership-type frigate factory for forward re-supply has only one shot with his fleet to make a beachhead to re-supply... the lines from neighbour stars are too long to be effective.

One hardened defense with a turtle focusing fire on enemy caps will be enough to grind an attack to a halt. Near end-game when it is complete system versus system, a player has a lot of credits to dispose of, and plenty of raw materials. Take your choke points, load them up with GG walls and pile up kodiaks, flaks and hangers... even if maintenance costs were changed to go beyond 75%, all a player needs to do is scuttle non-essentials outside the defensive lines.

Focus fire is killer in large scale fleet actions, and defenders have a massive advantage with z-axis blockades stopping movements to escape the fire. The AI doesn't focus as a tactic, but players do...

Would be interesting to test a few more scenarios out with more features enabled to see what balances out.

  

Keep in mind that for huge entertaining battles around stars to occur, there will need to be some way to force them to happen (such as Phase Space Inhibitor ships). Otherwise, a fleet will arrive and simply jump/attack the nearest planet. Your 'interdiction fleet' would then need to chase them. Phase Space Inhibitor ships removes all that chasing around game play lameness.

I see what you mean about mobile factories being needed to defeat the defending owner of a star system. So sure, include them in the game.

These mobile factories should also be able to produce much faster around stars (because of faster AM recharge), thus further encouraging battles around stars. It would also help in the assault on a hostile star system.

One thing I dont really get though, is why a ship in orbit around a star would be able to get antimatter? The only time I have known of a star to create antimatter is if is of a certain massive size when it went supernova. Enough energy was shooting out of the explosion of the star that antimatter formed which then met matter and exploded and caused the supernova to be around 10 times brighter. But a stable star does not emit antimatter and if it did, the antimatter would make contact with solar winds and explode (granted there is a chance that a single atom of AM could make it through the solar winds undetonated, but this is a very slim chance).

No, no, no. You aren't getting pure Antimatter from the star. What you ARE doing is using massive solar power potential to run your on board particle accelerator(s) = AM collection.

Another thought could be to build some sort of a warp-assist structure in the star gravity well to permit flight (or meaningfully facilitate it) between stars... this could be another possible reason for drawing strategic interest into having game play move into star gravity wells outside of tiny chokepoints in planetary traps.

Hey Neskonlith (is that your real name ), do you mean these structures would increase the speed of your fleets traveling between stars? Or would these structures be required to travel between stars?

I suppose it would depend on which use would make most sense, and not be too unbalanced... if a player owns the entire star system, then either option would provide another interesting reason to have their forces drawn out into the star grav wells which could force open fleet engagements as opposed to seige warefare type grinding that chokepoints allow.

There have been a lot of great ideas bounced around in this thread, and it would be nice to find a combination of military and empire reasons for contesting the star grav wells.

Fusion is constantly creating antimatter, although it doesnt spew it out.
even solar wind colliding with our high atmosphere creates minute traces of antimatter. its not significant, but its there.

sounds to me like you could just line the outside of your ship with a special series of force-tubes to collect antimatter, as high speed collisions of solar winds with... pretty much anything produces antimatter in particle jets.
its better than saying you have giant solar-nets on your ships, and much more feasible than having particle accelerators on your colony ships.

Well, I know that the winds hitting the atmosphere make some antimatter, I think I remember reading something about how a little bit of that antimatter makes up part of the Arora's at the poles. As for fusion creating antimatter, I dont think so. Fusion just creates a new atom that is the fused form of the two (or more) previous atoms that were fused. Antimatter might possibly be created in a star the same way that some is created when the winds hit the atmosphere. In that just high velocity particles run into each other and somehow some antimatter is made when they collide. But most likely this would only happen in the upper atmosphere of the Sun.