Economic Starbases - do they affect tax income?

No.

Nah, they affect the feeble freighter trading routes, though. If you apply all the mining modules, you can get a +24% production/technology boost in the surrounding planets, which is a lot of work for such a small benefit. *shrug* This game's like lifting weights for 12 years and gaining 1 lbs of muscle, eh?

That's 24% per starbase. You can easily get 16 economic starbases that can cover at least one 5 planet star system and usually two star systems. With a single array of 16 economic starbases you can get ten planets or so with a 384% production bonus. This is enough production to support an entire empire no matter how large.

The additional benefits of this is that the 384% bonus is applied *after* all other planet and global bonuses *and* that this bonus production costs only 50% of what 'normal' production costs. So the indirect answer to whether economic SB's can increase your income is yes they can. For the same amount of total production it costs less. Add to this the fact that many more planets can be made into income planets the net effect of doing this can be very positive on income.

Using this method I've gotten planets that can produce 2000 MP's per turn. The biggest, baddest battleships can be produced in two turns. Don't discount the power of properly used economic SB's. Note that these same kinds of arrays give a bonus to both production *and* research. I've gotten planets that produce 12,000 RP's per week with this and I've seen folks get up to 20,000 RP's week. Once the tech tree is done (rather quickly at this rate) you can then convert your research planets to production planets for the rest of the game.

I hope you don't mean turning your planets within the starbases' sphere into income planets. You should be doing the opposite: turning those into mega factory/research worlds. Maximize your free production.




Or just win. Most people I don't think try to coddle their Metaverse scores with a Military-only victory.

So the bottom line is there is no reason to have an economic starbase affect a purely economic planet? Any economic starbase I build should affect at least 1 planet that is a research or production planet , right? (not taking into account the trade route bonuses of course)

Thanks for the help!

Well I wouldn't say NO reason, in the same way you still need to build a factory for an economic planet. You can build/upgrade your markets faster because you have an economic starbase. But I don't think that is a good use of an economic starbase.

No, of course not. Turning the planets within the SB influence area to income planets is no benefit at all. It allows you to turn all planets not in the influence area into income planets because you don't need their production.


You can certainly use this to go for tech victories if that's what you prefer. However, it can make for a rather short game. If you want to combine this strategy with very fast tech you could probably win before the end of the colony rush. I personally don't really see much challenge in that. As far as military only victories, there are those that aren't satisfied with anything other than the complete and utter destruction of every form of life in the galaxy other than their own. I happen to be among them.   

Now *this* is the sort of dark side, sith lord, take-over-the-freaking-galaxy strategy that I've been searching for! Thank you! But I have a question(s). What is the absolute limit of starbases you can build in the game? Using your method would I have to neglect the resource mining bases?

There is no absolute limit but it does cost more and more each time to build a new one. IIRC I had to pay a couple of thousand bc's to get my 150th SB. Resource Mining SB's are always free and they do not count as part of your limit of 4 SB's per sector. Also other race's SB's in a sector don't stop you from having your own 4 SB's in that sector. I guess the absolute limit is 4 times the total number of sector's in the galaxy plus all the resource mining you can beg, borrow or steal.

One warning. When you do this and put these into full production or research mode your costs will go through the roof. Although bonus production costs only 50% this implies that a 20,000 RP research planet will cost you 10,000 bc's per week. Similarily 10 - 2,000 MP production planets will also cost 10K per week. You need to have your economy in good enough shape to handle these costs before attempting this.

And economy is my own personal hell in this game. I should probably ask you how *you* do it. All I do is devote 75% of my colonies to pure stock markets, 2 farms, 2 or 3 morale buildings. I of course plop down at least 2 factories in the beginning, and then upgrade them to stock markets when all is said and done. But there's got to be a better way... right?

That sounds about right. It may very well be better for your income to use 1 farm no morale buildings. What size galaxies are you playing in? Going evil and building the Mind Control Center with it's 100% economic bonus is big, but the most important thing is to hop on those economic resources right away, build them up as fast as you can and hold onto them throughout the whole game. Also your first priority in any war should be military and economic resources. Morale resources are pretty important too, but less so in DA versus DL. Actually the 75% of planets being economic seems a bit low I probably have closer to 90%. But the size of the galaxy comes into play. The bigger the galaxy the less percentage of production planets you need. You also need to get your morale under control so that you can get your taxes to 79%. If you do these things you should realistically expect your income planets to give you 1000 to 2000 bc's per week. Obviously this will be doubled if you get the prosperity event.

Really, that many? I play on Huge maps, anything smaller and it gets too crowded for my tastes. I've tried gigantic maps, but it just seems to add more space, not more planets, anomalies, etc.

In my current game I'm doing okay, I just started last night. I got 3 morale resources, 1 economic resource, 3 technology resources... there are no more economic resources on the map so far, but if I see them, I'm getting them. I think this is pretty good seeing as how no one has even initiated trade routes yet and I already have my freighters built. I am losing about -80 BC a turn, I have 7 planets, but I built 4 Probes (survey ships) with 3 speed and even better range than my initial flagship. That's 5 flagships altogether, and so I've raked in a sizable amount of money to keep me afloat, not to mention a lot of permenant bonuses. This is my new strategy--suck the universe dry of all anomalies before the AI can, muaahhahahha!
I also took someone's advice and instead of building things, I let the population grow until they are getting about 5 BC before I start building up the colony. It seems to work, and allows me to keep the colonization going.
I'm going to be loading up the game soon. Here's hoping I don't lose... again.

Me too!