Starbase Defense Bonus Not Being Applied?

Huh, no text in the topic at all? Well actually, I've just noticed the same thing. In particular, I just halted a challenging game I've been playing because I have a bunch of fleets gathered around a military starbase that all just got wiped out by the Arcaens's inferior but vastly more numerous fleet because I invested heavily in defense bonuses. Ones that aren't even applied, from the look of the battles.

I added a beam interceptor and a protective field to my starbase. I fought several battles within the radius of this base. During combat, enemies were able to inflict full damage to my ships. Also, in the after-battle report, I noticed that I did not receive any starbase bonuses. Oddly enough, I have fought battles within enemy starbase range that indicated the enemy received these bonuses.

This is sort of an unfortunate bug, since I thought one of the neatest features was the idea that a starbase could add bonuses to ships, adding a very cool "fort" feeling to the game. Alas.

Hmmm... I think in stardock central someone gave me the answer. The ship in range has to have that type of defense already. In other words, the starbase bonus augments existing ship defenses, but does not provide a bonus if the ship does not have defenses of that type.

IIRC, it's not that it needs that specific type of defense....it just needs to have a single piece of defensive equipment on board. So if your starbase adds +3 to beam defense, you can have as little as a +1 missile, mass driver, OR beam defense and you'll get the +3 to beam as well.

Blif

They really ought to do away with that. Why do I need one armor to use a starbase's added protection?

It's likely calculated as a defensive "bonus", but if your defense is 0, then naturally multiplying anything by 0 results in 0.