ORIGINAL: Spidey
You're doing pretty well, Ice, but there are two questions I'm left with after reading that AAR.
1) You don't put labs onto your mining stations? At least I didn't notice you saying you did. To me, doing that is an essential way of keeping my state maintenance costs down while making mining stations even more useful while drawing a bit heavier upon that massive chunk of money the civilian sector is going to sit on anyway. For that reason, long range scanners end up on mining bases too and never on any state bases.
2) You're specializing your research bases? What I tend to do with them is 2 of each lab on all three of them. This way, my super-geek scientist with +% in all three skills (assuming I have one) can keep on providing his bonus in the two weaker schools until I've actually found and built a base on a better bonus. I'm using the first space port for ratio manipulation very early on and then reduce gradually through retrofits as mining stations go up.
I call it an Energy Research Station but it's really a Mega Research Station with all Labs and all Scientists in one location at my home world. The bonuses from those scientists stack as well. The benefit is that it's faster to build and upgrade (as you can see I've upgraded a couple of times already) as compared to waiting for construction ships and mining stations to build. That may well change as the game progresses though e.g. use of bonus locations.
The reason I don't integrate them with a Spaceport is to get research going quickly without waiting for all those docking bays, yards, plants and so on to build. Also building a Research Station sometimes spawns a new scientist which can be very handy early game.
Good point on state versus private maintenance costs; however, the Maintenance Cost of the Mega Research Station is only 3K.
