Best place to build star bases?

[Alxndr]

I've upgraded my first few outposts into star bases with shipyards and anchorages to act as support and fast ship building. I have also created a star base on each of my 2 choke points that lead directly to neighbouring empires.

I have fortify the border edict running so I have access to 3 additional star bases. Do you think it would be better to build them evenly distributed across my empire with shipyards so when I go to war and need to reinforce my fleets, I have many shipyards all building in parallel and reinforcements coming from multiple locations.

My logic is if there's a war on either front, some of my shipyards are somewhere in the middle of both choke points to create an even reinforcement time frame.

Where do you place your "left over" star bases?

[Speed Malus]

Sector Capitals for a mix of Trade Hubs and guns. (If you are running gestalt you can ignore this and just run Shipyards)

Choke Points, L-Gates and Wormholes as only guns

And basically 1-2 Shipyard Dedicated one per sector.

Couple of Max Anchorage Starbasses you really need more Ship Space.

Edit: not going to try and list out EVERY special case when it comes to Civic and Precursor Starbase Modules

[Chthonic Guardian]

I think you and Speed Malus have it right.
Chokepoints! All or nothing with them. I make my stand there and see no need for fallback bases because if they get to them it means my fleet has been wiped out. A fully military starbase or 2 internally to help with cranking out the ships during a war/siege is nice, everything else is what you need etc.
I make a few as trade and storage vault civilian types of bases.

Oh and don't forget to throw a weapon or 2 on civi bases to cut back on trade pirates and deal with some random low level Amoeba attack or something.

[CrUsHeR]

For trade empires, i like to do one big highway of starbases.

Having them all adjacent in one long chain effectively prevents any potential piracy from happening. Sometimes the game takes odd routing choices, or an event creates a shortcut between systems, so make sure you set the routes yourself when necessary.

Base collection range (since some update) is +1, mercantile gives another +1.
So you can precisely plan ahead which colonies can be covered without extra trade hub buildings, and where you need to place extra trade hubs to collect everything.

Everything else which isn't a bastion or shipyard should be anchorages.

Once you can build gateways, you probably can also greatly expand your starbase limit, or exceed it because it only costs more energy upkeep. At that point you want an anchorage starbase on top of every relevant colony (for the +5 stability from the black site) and a gateway leading to your capital so it doesn't cause piracy.

[Geronimo]

Also, if you hold a large empire, it is more likely you'll get attacked and holding larger empires are relatively more difficult because it is unwise to divide your fleet in more than 3 parts.

So when you place your star bases, try to limit the distance towards each other as much as possible, so that fleets can aid star bases and become basically impossible to take with the combined fighting force of starbase + fleet. That means you have to decide that in a situation of conflict, which systems you can give up freely that wouldn't hurt your population base or economy.

[Kufesska]

systems with Enclaves for Starbase Modules
i like Rare Resource traders(-% market fee), Salvagers(empire wide building speed) and Curators(some free science)
also black hole systems for science
and anchorage starbase stacking can give you a lot of naval cap, so you can make your POPs work smth different than soldiers