Starbase Influence Range

Highlight the starbase. There will be a ring displayed around the base, either a colored highlight area (DL) or a dashed line (DA).

Also note that if even the smallest portion of the influence area covers a certain parsec then that parsec gets the effect of the SB. Here's a diagram that I've posted a few times. The green circle shows the influence area of a SB located at the X and the red polygon shows the parsecs that received the benefit of the SB's influence. You can also view this in the opposite sense where X is the location of a planet or fleet and the red area show where SB's can be placed and still affect the planet/fleet at location X.

I am running DA. I have a mining starbase which is mining an economic resource.
When I select the mining starbase, no circle appears no matter how far back I zoom the view. I did see this circle when I selected my constructor that built the starbase, but ever since I built the starbase I can not see the area of influence it effects. I want to make sure that my trade routes are running thru this area for the supposed added economic bonus, but I'm not able too see it.
I didn't see any options to turn this circle on or off.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you

Well you can use the chart I posted above. That will tell you the area of influence even if you can't see the circle.

As far as not being able to see the circle AFAIK there aren't any options to turn it off. I have heard of issues with this when selecting custom colors but I think that was when someone selected black as their race color, a particularly poor choice of colors. Other than that I have no clue as to why you aren't seeing a influence area.

However, trade routes are unaffected by running through the area of influence of a resource mining SB regardless of the resource that is being mined. Trade routes are only affected by economic starbases *not* resource mining starbases that happen to be mining an economic resource. Also the economic SB must have a trade module installed to affect trade as well. AFAIK there are three different trade modules that can be installed on an economic SB; Trading Post (Trade+10%), Advanced Trading Post (Trade+20%) and Trade Center (Trade+30%). You need to have the required tech for the module (Trade, Advanced Trade, Master Trade) as well as the lower module installed to add the next module.

However the fact that your attempting to use a mining starbase incorrectly has no bearing on being able to see it's area of influence, it still should be visible when the SB is selected.

Thanks Mumblefratz, I guess I didn't realize there was an "economic starbase", I thought I was accomplishing that by using my constructor to create a mining starbase to harvest an economic resource. I'll have to look into it further to understand the difference. I did go thru all of the tutorials and the game manual looking for this (and a lot of other) info, and have only been able to find answers from fine resources on the forum such as yourself. Thanks again.

There is a lot of information to absorb and I can easily see the possibility of confusion. Certainly the Wiki is a good source of detailed information that you can use to look up something specific but it's good to have something to read that gives you some idea what everything is so that you even know enough to ask the right question.

One source I've used and I think is still very helpful for the new player is a FAQ/Strategy Guide by cyberj914. It's old and last updated for v1.1 of DL circa April 2006 but it provides an all round description of everything that really doesn't exist anywhere else that I've found.

Anyway this is hosted on GameFAQs at WWW Link. Follow the link and click on the FAQ & Guides tab and then click on the FAQ/Strategy Guide link.