Also, I think I know why, even when I was parked on the base, enemies were able to kill the base from underneather me, I never used upgraded engines, my ships were tanks, very effective thus far, but slow.
That shouldn't matter. Your ship speed doesn't matter. What Willy said made the most sense to me.
My guess is they are fortifying the base and defending with relatively weak ships, so the base is the strongest "fleet" in the pile.
I agree. If you fortify your starbase and then just have individual ships in the same parsec as the starbase then your starbase is the strongest and therefore first to be attacked.
Basically you should never arm starbases because of this and because it's a waste of time. Just make sure you have a strong fleet of ships in the same parsec and *that* should always be the first thing the AI has to attack.
Question, is there a way to upgrade a ship without buying it directly? Like pick the refit option, then it appears in the build queue for the base/planet?
No, upgrades are purchase only.
Did I mis a standard repair option, or is it the proxomity repair thing near a base with that module?
Not quite sure what you're asking but ships automatically repair themselves slowly over time and will repair somewhat faster if placed in orbit about a planet, but there are no repair modules that you can add to a starbase that will speed repair.
What I was talking about was that you can use the ship upgrade feature to repair ships by doing a fake upgrade of a ship to a differently named but otherwise identical ship. The only thing proximity has to do with this is the fact that the further you are from your own area of influence the longer an upgrade takes.
I love not being flamed for asking a question unlike other game genres.
This site has always been relatively helpful. Perhaps it's just because it tends to be an older crowd that's interested in TBS although if you wander outside of the GalCiv2 specific forums into things like Off-topic and the like you may get a bit different response since those categories are shared with perhpas a dozen different sites.
Overall I think all of Stardock's forums attract a higher calibre of person that's less likely to flame someone than most other game sites, but there's always going to be the exception that makes the rule.
As far as backing up ship and raceconfig files it should be as simple as saving them off somehwere and putting them back later, but I'm not absolutely positive and the file locations depend on whether you'r playing DL, DA or TA.