Oh uh, one more thing, Star Bases are very powerful. Since I can build whatever the heck I want in any system within trade range I might as well try out a maxed out star base against remnants in a system I did not own planets in

The HP of the Starbase was high enough to fend off about 1.2M of combined but spread out strength of remnants, spread over 3 fleets. After they ran out of supplies, the regen of the Star Base kept it going for longer than the remnants and boom I got a cheap, easy, and fast trick to beat them now

Something costing me 541K/100K as a base with about 150K maintenance and some trivial build costs for upgrades, compared to a 10M build cost 800K+ maintenance fleet of about 700K strength, including support ships with supply capacity, it seems a bit off.

The things that makes it very good in my opinion are:
- High regen
- No supply, meaning it fires when something is hostile and in range until the end of times
- Cheap
- If a system is within trade range you flood it with starbases on the limit of remnant aggro zones, system is yours, you spend one mid-game budget cycle on it build cost wise
- Damage-wise, its not that great. Its just OK. However, these factors above make it a monster when the enemy fleet runs out of supply.

Suggestions to balance it:
- Build costs scale with distance, starting from the point it exits the system borders
- Slightly more damage*
- Supply capacity so it will stop firing if you cut off supply

*Why more damage? Well, if these suggestions will be implemented the power of the Starbase will be drastically reduced. Just getting it to survive until enemy fleets run out of supplies won't work anymore, and on its own it deals not that much damage. Buffing it up a little bit will keep the Starbase something to consider but something that can still be beaten with the right preparation

I don't know how I kept missing the stations tab. I thought I had clicked it but I just didn't. FTL was sitting right there patiently waiting for me to use it. I got it going again. GG to you sir if you got through my cringe.

I guess I just don't understand the game properly yet, my comments about you having to explain stuff about FTL are void now. Its fine, my bad

Glad you could find the build option by yourself. I agree it's not really intuitive and this particular feature could benefit from a bit more polishing. I'm not really satisfied with how the FTL prototypes work and I want to have a look at this at some point.

Concerning the balance of starbases vs remnants, one thing you may not have noticed is that they benefit from research; more precisely, Orbital Command will improve them the same way as outposts, which means each upgrade improves their health and they also benefit from other upgrades such as Orbital Construction and Kinetics. Contrary to you, remnants don't research improvements and aside from a few exceptions, remnants cease being any threat at all once you tech up a bit, so it's only logical that starbases quickly overpower them. In all fairness, you can easily come up with a station design of about the same costs which will put starbases to shame in terms of fire power and resilience, because starbases, far from replacing dedicated battle stations, are basically a stronger version of outposts intended to offer better protection from planet capture. Starbases are not that much stronger than outposts actually, they start with double health and armor and have access to better upgrades, but gain the same flat bonuses from research (identical to vanilla), which means their efficiency decreases (compared to outpost health) as your tech level increases.
Now the difference with outposts is that they have more and bigger guns, which makes them suitable for tactics such as the one you described, but then again, you can do the same, with even stronger results, with a station of equivalent costs. I concede though that stations do have to cope with supply and it's probably a good idea to account for this more than I originally did (orbitals cannot have supply, not without extensive scripting, they work completely differently than stations).
It's also true that the difference in costs and efficiency of fleets vs stations / orbitals is massive, because 1) fleets can move and someone's gotta pay for the fuel 2) stations have an innate health bonus and I balanced starbases after my own station designs, and 3) research reduces the costs of stations and orbitals.
Also, one important detail you overlooked: you can only build one starbase in a system.
My point of view is that, if anything, remnants are the ones in need of a buff, but from my experience from vanilla SR2 and SR1, they are meant to be this way, as a vestige of an ancient civilization (in Rising Stars lore, Ulthaar) more advanced than you in the beginning, until you become more advanced than them and crush them like bugs. Taking into account how much longer it is to expand in Shores of Infinity, would it really be a good thing to make them harder and potentially slow said expansion down even more?

You were right. I tested it again, and after failing so many times because I seem to be unable to design anything effectively, I got some stupid thing that seemed to work against any remnant vessel but the remnant guardian in charge of protecting the core of the galaxy or anything of similar strength, where Starbases failed. My earliest design that could maybe beat those stations turned out to have not enough supply storage because I forgot to add that part of course!

Anyway, I had maybe one or two things to say but that has to wait for today. Do you get notified if I edit this comment? Or is it handier if I just make another one?

No I won't be notified if you edit, so it's better to just make a new post :)