Yes. The only criteria is that to get a weapons bonus the ships must have at least a single point of attack. It doesn't matter what category the attack point(s) are in, a ship with beam attck will suddenly have mass driver attack if in the AOI (area of influence) of a military SB with a mass driver ship assist module installed. The same thing goes for defense as well. A ship with a single point of defense will get the benefit of any type of ship assist defense, but it has to have at least one point of defense to gain this benefit.

Also you're correct in that it's the "ship assist" modules with the little ship icon that provide the benefit. Don't be confused by modules that provide attack and defense capability to the starbase itself. These modules don't help the ships at all but will attack/defend when the starbase itself is attacked. The following two tables list all these modules. The "ship assist" modules can only be installed on a military starbase the starbase attack/defense modules can be installed on any starbase.

This function can be kind of cool however they're not really of much practical use since once the action moves to another area of the map they're useless. Where they do get used is to maximize your military score. Now if these things could *move* or be towed albeit slowly and at great expense then that would be really cool.

 

Get one stabase into enemy territory, and Ship assist is a great cheap asset against an approximately equivalent or mildly more powerful adversary, particularly at low levels where three points of assist is doubling or quadrupling your firepower - small constructors with 1 point lasers can quite suddenly hold their own quite well against heavy fighters.

I suppose I should find out at some point how those systems 'stack'  - if you have two starbases with shipp assist within each other's range, do they assist one another? More horridly, if you have overlapping 'speed assist', do both of them help the ships involved?

"Okay, here's the plan - we're going to put you in this slingshot . . . you're going to start slowing down around proxima . . . "

"I *hate* this plan . . ."

Jonnan

That's a great piece of advice, IMHO.  It makes the prospect of a backwater Factory World much more appealing.  Normally I always opt to turn those places into Research / Cash farms, but with infrastructure like this, they might actually be able to get ships into place.

Not quite. You have to install the modules to the starbase(s) first. The required module column is for modules that need to have another module installed before they can be installed. For example the Stellar Wake module requires Warp Drive but does not require any other module to be installed first whereas the Beam Interceptor requires Starbase Defenses plus the Battle Stations module before it can be installed.

Once you've researched Warp Drive then the Stellar Wake module will be available to be installed and with 4 overlapping military starbases all with Stellar Wake installed then that adds +4 speed to any ship starting in the overlapping AOI of the 4 starbases. Once Warp Drive IV has been researched the the Inverse Tractor Beam module becomes available and if that module is installed on the same 4 military starbases then any ship that starts it's turn in the overlapping AOI of the 4 military starbases will have +8 to it's speed.

Note that the speed assist as well as the Interdiction Beam (Enemy Speed -1) only affects ships that start their turn in the AOI of the starbases. Any ships just passing through that don't end their turn within the AOI will be unaffected.

You can get a pair of "sweet spots" where the AOI of 24 starbases overlap which can give you +48 speed to any ship starting there. Of course a fully maxed out military starbase will add 54 points of attack and 9 points of defense (it says 10 but it's really 9) to every ship in it's AOI. The same 24 starbases if maxed out with ship assist modules will add 24*(54+9)=1512 points of attack/defense per ship. This is often used to maximize your military score by those interested in high scores.

Also note this chart is *really* old dating back to the first release of GalCiv2 (DL v1.0) and I'm pretty sure there is a discrepancy or two in the chart. For example I think that one of the Battle Stations prerequisites isn't correct and that allows you to get further towards maximizing the ship assist modules without Battle Stations than you otherwise would however to get to the *full* 54 attack 9 defense ship assist capability you will need to add Battle Stations, however that is the *only* non ship assist module that you have to have to max out a military starbase (other than speed if you wish). Note that this takes a total of 28 constructors for just the 54 attack/9 defense assist.

As far as the starbase attack/defense modules themselves I think most players agree that those are a total waste of time.

One DA game I used a full array to launch transports at 72 moves. Invaded 163 planets in a turn that way . Fun Stuff.

New Avatar.

I've never needed to use the speed assist for DL so I have no personal experience of this but from what you and Sole Soul mentions I think that Inverse Tractor Beam is probably +2 instead of just +1 for a toal of +3 with both modules installed.

Thus the words "If I'm reading Mumblefratz's chart correctly" - {G}. But yeah, after he corrected me I knew I shoulda known better than try and read that that way - what I get for reading @ work - {G}.

Still means I've been using them entirely wrong - even without a 'sweet spot' I hadn't been using these to anything like their potential.

Although personally, I've evidently had more luck with starbase defenses than many other have had - barring my mistake this game of letting the dreadlords get a dreadnought up, typically my starbases can handle whatever is thrown at them.

Jonnan

How do you guys afford these enormous slingshot arrays of military starbases?  I find that mining and a minimal set of economic starbases (just ones which can affect 4+ worlds) bring me to the point where new starbases cost 1000+ bc.  Mid/late game economies could afford that, but that's money which could instead be spent upgrading veteran warships, buying improvements on newly acquired planets, etc.  As a result, I've never been able to use large numbers of starbases (particular this speed boosting military starbase array strategy) to the extent that I would prefer.  Am I missing something?  Thanks!

No, you can't.

Sorry, Jonnan.

When I see comments like this I always wonder how much income folks are actually talking about. You'd be surprised how little income some folks think is a lot. Obviously it all depends on the size of the game, the version you're playing and what it is you're trying to accomplish, but just to give you a figure of merit in my last game my final income was 1,700,000 bc's per turn. Also I didn't find it all that difficult to spend it down to below the 20K limit each and every turn. It just required purchasing about 450 1/1 huge hull fighters per turn for under my military starbase array.

I definitely understand your point and it has validity. There's no doubt that using your income to fund production and then using that production to produde ships is more efficient than rush buying them, however that's where "what it is you're trying to accomplish" comes into play.

First off there are a couple of mitigating factors that make rush buying instead of production not quite as inefficient as it seems at first. On the face of it you can spend 1 bc to support 1MP of production or you can spend 10 bc's to rush buy that same 1MP of production. This implies a 10 to 1 advantage of build over rush buy. However one point this doesn't consider is that you can have significant global income bonus due to the mining of economic resources. There are no equivalent production mining resources. 

Certainly you can build economic starbase arrays that increase production on the planets in their area of influence. I've been there and done that quite a bit myself and am very familar with the technique. However this isn't the same since you can't get nearly global coverage and the point is that the actual production bonus isn't what's important, the true benefit of bonus production as it relates to income is that it costs 1/2. Whether you have an extra 400% production bonus of a few planets in the galaxy really isn't that significant. However I can easily have a 400% economic bonus applied to every tile on every planet. So any tile that I put a stockmarket on instead of an Industrial Sector gets multiplied by 5. This takes the 10 to 1 advantage of build versus buy down from 10 to 1 down to 2 to 1. Now I know my math is awful fuzzy here but it's a reasonable order of magnitude approximation.

The other point about income is that it's one of the four components of score. So here's where "what it is you're trying to accomplish" comes into play. If you play to maximize score like I do then a high income is an ends unto itself. I don't get any direct credit to my score for having a tremendously huge production capacity. I do get indirect credit for production in my military score based on how many powerful ships I can produce. So the question is what is the net effect to score by having less income and (perhaps) more production able to produce more ships.

The reason I say perhaps is because in reality I can produce far more ships with my income than you can build with your production. With my 1.7M bc per week income over the course of my game I was effectively able to "produce" 17,000 huge hull ships with about 4000 attack/defense points each. Essentially I was able to produce one of these ships per turn from every single planet that I owned for extensive periods of time. How this is done is not totally obvious and would require a longer explanation than I care to go into at the moment but the result definitely outclasses anything I've seen from normal production.

The point of all of this is not that I'm right and you're wrong because what we're trying to accomplish is different. I'm playing for score and the way I play has been fine tuned to maximize score at each step. You're playing as one would play against a human RTS opponent and for that scenario your method is no doubt more efficient. Neither method is right or wrong. The only point to this game is to have fun and we all do that in differnet ways. Part of the beauty of this game is that there are so many different ways you can play it. 

Nothing shabby about that. 

Actually I'm still playing DL although I'm probably going to move to DA for my next game but we'll see how the install goes (I'm Impulse adverse, it's a long story). In a DL gigantic galaxy I usually get 28-30 total mining resources with an average of about 6 of each type. They can vary from 4 to 8 per type though that's rare, 5-7 is more typical.

I think DA gets about the same but from what I've heard the Immense TA galaxy gets about 33 total which is an increase of about 10% and there are some tricks you can play to get mining resource bonuses of greater than 60% per starbase (by gaining unique starbase techs from other races).

But anyway in my last DL game I did get lucky with 8 economic resources which gives 8*39%=312%. I get another 90% from racial ability (30%), Xeno Economics (10%), Star Federation (30%) and Federalists (20%). I also get 100% from the Mind Control Center. Finally you pick up a double handful of +1% economic ability anomalies and last game I ended up with an economic ability of 515%. That actually translates to multplying your income by 6.15.

In fact that's only the half of it because throw in the economic prosperity event and that double everything in effect multipling my income by over 12. Like I said 1.7 million bc's *per turn*.

However normally I only get 6 economic resources so my "normal" economic bonus is closer to 435% or thereabouts. The 1.7M is my record income. My average is closer to 1.3M per turn.