Defensive bases & Monitoring stations

[mordachai]

Would love to have control -- separately -- over whether these get auto-built by automation.

I love having "notify, but then do" for "bases" -- and if that only affected things like mining bases, research stations, and tourism - I'd be golden.

but that also affects the decision to build defense bases - which:
1. are crazy-expensive
2. are lame at defense (unless they're heavily loaded w/ fighters mid to late game, because they're only able to cover an irrelevant part of the orbit).

So they trash your econ for negligible value.

Even should they start orbiting or be better at actually blocking incoming attacks - the bottom line is that I want control over military spending separately from what is essentially infrastructure spending.

Same is true for facilities. I have to leave those all on "default to 'no'" because the automation wants to build massive redundancy everywhere and ruin the economy. Would be much nicer to say "always approve X, Y, Z, ask about I and J, never approve K, L, M" or similar.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I hope there will be some balance pass at some time as all fixed defences (and facilities in general) in the game are way to expensive to be worth it and it also tank AI economies so they can't field enough fleets to oppose a human player in a reasonable way. The same goes for the huge amount of escorts the AI use for no good reasons considering their costs involved. The private industry should build and maintain escort ships on their own, not the state, would help the AI and keep the escorts in the game at least to some degree.

I think there are too little soft reason for not spreading your military structures and strategic buildings around. Currently it all comes down to money... income versus maintenance costs. The lower the maintenance cost the more research and planets and mining operations you can support which leads to snowballing your income in comparison to the competition.