For the price of a constructor and a few hundred BC, you can substantially boost your fleet, for a lot less than what it would cost to outfit your ships.  I tend to use them when I am militarily outmatched.  If you prevent just one small hulled warship from dying--that costs, what--120 ship production and maybe 1 elerium?--you more than make up the cost.  And you have nothing to show for a dead ship.  With a military SB, it's always there.  You can keep it, decommission, trade, patrol, lure enemies in, whatever. 

Military starbases are devastatingly effective in planetary or area defense, especially when several are constructed overlapping the area you want to defend. I could see the argument made to increase the number of administrators to two over your idea of reducing to zero. Right now Im in a game on a ludicrous map with 35 godlike AI players who all declared war on me, except my one ally. I have had several dozen turns of wave after wave of the combined armada's of 34 Civilizations smashed to pieces by my fleets supported by my fully upgraded military starbase defenses. It would be worse if I lost my military starbases over my homeworld.

They are also good as fleet range extenders.

Is there a practical SB density limit in GC3?  In GC2 there is a limit of 4 SBs per sector.  But there are no sectors in GC3.  I seem to have run into one, like SBs have to be about 2 hexes apart.  But that is hardly a limit. 

There's Arceans?  I don't have Arceans.  Oh, the DLC...

And I have SBs a lot closer the 5 hexes.  I have to check, but I think it's 2 (3?).  v. 2.33.

Military starbases are your key to defender advantage. In Civilization, the defender gets faster healing on their territory, their cities can bombard enemy armies, etc, the defender has an advantage. 

In Galactic Civ you need a military starbase to achieve this. It's a "home turf" advantage. Early on in the game they boost the effectiveness of your ships by an ENORMOUS amount. This will become less significant with time unless you upgrade your bases. If you're playing a turtle strategy, say, you're playing as the Altarians and going for a tech victory, military starbases can literally win you the game. 

I'm happy with their effectiveness, what annoys me, however, is trying to defend a huge empire with them. I end up needing a dozen of them. I think there should be more ways to extend the range of, specifically, military bases. 

Of course you can, there are a dozen or two dozen technologies that enhance the military base's ability to boost ships in its area of effect. 

Ironically, I only play militaristic (tried Benevolent, needed to invade) and  have never used a military base either. For one, non-military bases are easy enough to harden and use for ship shelters. I do like the idea of using military bases to create a command circuit, so I tried using military bases for frontline beachheads but on ludicrous maps it's fairly pointless.

If you could throw in something that actually made my military planning, like a high level base module that would "mine" the area of affect, then I'd start using them immediately. As it stands, the military base is difficult to use with fleets unless you're on a small map and a waging a protracted war.

Dunno what difficulty you guys are playing where you can win a peaceful game without military bases. Or any game for that matter. 

In games where I'm the warmonger, I usually build very few of them, and primarily to speed my ships up. 

In games where I'm building and defending, however, military star bases are the difference between winning and losing. Military bases allow you to fight off 2 civs at the same time, and still build up your economy. They make a HUGE difference. It's not difficult to get them to boost your ships by about 30-40% in weapons and defenses. 

Well, there you have it, that is exactly it. You won't win a game at 'incredible' or even 'genius' level without using a MSB. 

Anyway, game is broken right now as the AI can't use farms/cities. Seriously, you want to beat the game on the highest difficulty? All you need to do is build msb's for defence, then sit there and build cities to grow your population. Then win because your economy will be 5x the size of everyone else's combined. You could have 2 planets and easily beat a civ with 20 planets because the AI will never grow its population. 20 planets is only 60 pop for the AI. You can get 150-200 pop on a single planet if you know what you're doing. 

The MSB allows you to turtle and grow like that because you will need to build fighters because the AI will rush you with its own fighters. 

I'm not talking about carriers. I'm talking about fighters, at the beginning of the game. When you play on high difficulty, the AI attacks you around turn 50. You need a fleet by then. I don't mean you can start building a fleet on turn 50, I mean you need a fleet already built and ready to fight and a msb or two on your border, or you die. 

Sorry, that's what I meant. I call the tiny hulls fighters and small hulls corvettes, just out of habit, but I shouldn't assume people will know what I mean

"Cannon fodder" is more accurate, though longer.

Just found the +4 ODB level.  Nice.

In god mode I order a fleet to attack a military SB.  The AI countermands the order immediately.  No wonder they're so successful.