Starbase Plus

Starbase plus is one of the classic VGA Planets addons, written by Dan & Dave. It is considered one of the more balanced addons since it simply extends the use of all starbases, equally for every race. It enables starbases to lay mines, scan for mines and sweep them, or scoop up your own minefields. This ofcourse helps for example the Robots, the Crystalline (who can even lay webmines from their bases) and the Evil Empire far more than for example the Feds: without this addon, the Robots and the Evil Empire have only one minelayer, while the Federal fleet is already filled with minelayers.

Laying a field with your base can be useful when you're stupid enough not to have a ship capable of laying a nice minefield there to protect it. Scanning for mines never hurts ofcourse, but when you have to use your base to sweep an enemy field that's covering it you're already in deep trouble. This comes in especially handy when the Crystals have been able to lay a web covering your planet, or some huge Robot field prevents your ships from flying to and from your base. Ofcourse you have some nice ship guarding your base, ready to sweep those mines (remember: a Diplomacy or even an Arkham hull with warp 1 engines, no tubes and good beams will do this very well), but the base sweeping along with it never hurts. Just remember that starbase+ minesweeping actually happens before minelaying in the hostorder, so you can't sweep (web)mines in the same turn as they're being laid.

Starbase+ can also be used for transporting ship components using MDSFs. In fact, this enables any race to build a transwarp ship on a Humanoid base without raising the enginetech by simply shipping in the engines. Two reasons for the Feds not to do this: you've got better ships to build than MDSFs, and you can reach the same objective using superrefit. The only way this option can be useful for you would be to transport some transwarp-engines to a starbase over a humanoid planet which doesn't have the proper techlevels yet. But moving around shipparts, using a ship you normally wouldn't build or could at least be used better for moving around minerals is probably more of a hassle than raising some cash on that humanoid base. Or simply tow the tech1-engined ship from the humanoid base to one where you can put transwarps on it.

The most useful option of the Starbase+ addon is the electronic money transfer: you can transfer money from one base to another. This comes in very handy when you have one or more bases with a lot of money (close to Avians or Insects) and other bases in need of money. Too bad bases need at least 20 techpoints (total techlevels) to be able to send or receive money so you can't send those heeps of cash to that base you've just built this turn. So don't forget to ship some money to your newly built bases and raise some techlevels (assuming no free tech-natives raising all techlevels to 5 will cost you 4000 MCs) before you can transfer money in from other bases. The default limit to what one base can send per turn is 3000 MCs, but a base can receive an unlimited amount of cash per turn. So it is possible to have twelve bases each send 3000 MCs to one base, and spread it further from there.