There were some folks on hail talking about a really neat strategy.
Building a ton of SMALL cities to act as nothing but fortresses.
See... Each base gives you a -1 penalty (which is ignored for the first N bases if your city is very large). But think about it. Small city. Church, +2. Cantina, +2. Food, +2. Loyalty, uh...It's either +1 or +2, I don't remember. Low taxes, you'll probably get +1 or +2. So all in all, you have at least six morale points, maybe as high as nine, that you can blow on base penalties while still maintaining a perpetually positive population growth. Oh yeah, and since the city's so small, loyalty grows pretty darn fast.
So you have one big city that has a lot of farms, a lot of power generation, whatever. And then you line it with a bunch of itty bitty cities that have a magmium condo, big church and cantina, fire station probably, road connection to your main city (land connection is required to share power)...and a crapton of bases. And that's it. You build as many of those as you damn well please. Someone wants to land on your planet? Yeah, that's nice, you have ten fortress cities with eight lasers apiece. Kaboom.
Oh and while I'm on the subject. Missile bases currently function as lasers, so don't be afraid to build them--they do work. And word on the street is that shields cover a range of 7 tiles, +1 per tech level (oh yeah that's fecking big). Is that radius? I'm not sure, but I'm guessing yes. (I don't know exactly what shields do to be honest. Or if they overlap. Meh, I repeat what I hear.) So the optimal strategy apparently is "build one shield generator by your town square, and an assload of lasers/missiles all right next to the town square as well so they can all cover each other". Because seriously. Is somebody going to successfully cap one of your towers when there are seven other towers shooting at them? Really? No, not really, just no. And even if they do...they've got how many other cities to work through while your empire rides in to the rescue.