I am looking for suggestions on which steps to take to defend a level 8 base. Truthfully, its been so long since I've done it, I've forgotten. Thank you.

At GD, we use our base buffs right before our ability points come back every day, which gives us 4 free hours of buffs if we get locked in that short window.

If we actually do get locked, we basically keep an eye out for whether FFA starts early, otherwise sometime between 5 hours to 4 hours remaining on the lock we'll apply the buffs, generally aiming at defense, hull, and shield buffs. We save the emergency repair for after the base is close to dead but while the buffs are still up. Then the rest of the AP will go towards emergency repairs until the lock expires.

Not much else that you can do, past finding the legion that locked you (and potentially anybody in their battle group) on your battle tab and disabling them.

On the rare occasions we do get locked, everybody burns all their silvers applying clamps as well (on top of our contests now and then when a lot get applied anyway.)

That's good information and I thank you for that. I was thinking more in terms of Battlestations, Dimensional Decoy etc. Those are about the only 2 steps that I can remember. I remember that once locked there were a progression of steps that needed to be taken in a certain order.

Well, for general daily base buffs, we put everything on.

For actual base locks, we don't bother with traps or attack. Otherwise, apply away. (Well, skip any production buffs while defending; we don't add the research or mining buffs since we don't produce any of that anyway.)

In my opinion Dimensional decoy are a waste of AP. There is another one you shouldn't bother with but damned if I can remember

ANY attack buffs are just pointless.

We have had good luck with the inverse energy trap... if the base is getting pounded on very fast, it can get triggered by multiple ships. We've seen attack get above 450k recently starting from basically none. Didn't stop the attack, but it took longer. That also somewhat shows how unbalanced the ship strengths have gotten in game. At some point the attackers hit the damage cap of 600/hit... so if a big group locks, all you can really do is make them sit and click longer.. or I suspect most auto click. Their click times seem faster than reasonable. I'm also amazed people are manually clicking for 4 hours consistently. They have either automated or they have no lives. In any case, adding defense doesn't stop those ships.

No but it does make a difference. If you add enough defense to reduce my damage by 10, and I attack a base, say, 10,000 times, that's 100k damage less that I've done over the course of the 8 hours. Multiply that by 60 ships (unrealistic, I know, but it makes the point) and that's 6M damage you've mitigated.

But... once you are at the 600 pt cap, you are at the cap. I can't reduce you below that cap. If you would normally be doing 5000, but are capped to 600, then increasing our defense and cutting you to 4990 is still going to allow you to hit at th 600 cap. It makes no difference.

That's not how damage is calculated. Your damage is calculated as a percentage of the cap, and then scaled up. Adding defense does make a difference.

450k attack would maybe make the stronger hitters have to spend a couple of seconds repairing every 10-15 minutes or so. So pretty much worthless. In any case, Customized Decoys stack - so an attacking ship can just pop a few of those, and mitigate most incoming damage.

How could you possibly tell how fast individuals amongst multiple players hitting your base were clicking? And how do you know it's the same players hitting for the entire duration? My experience is, yes - you may get a few nutters (of which I confess to being one!) who will click for hours on end, but you also have many players drifting in and out over the course of the lock who hit for maybe 10-15 minutes at a time.

Yep, we've always got plenty of big hitters available that have and do click, click, click... from start to finish, even if that requires several hours of non-stop clicking. A good defence is also knowing when not to waste all of your remaining ability points for the sake of allowing your base to live an extra few hours too