So, Ive been playing for more than a hundred hours now (well, maybe not playing, sometimes spending hours just to create a ship) and after this many hours Ive used the military ring once (yes, you read correctly 1) and the influence ring maybe 10 times. The rest of my starbases are economic or mining. And Open Borders treaty Ive only used as candy wgile bargaining with the lesser races, since nobody seem to care about it (least of them me 
). All in all, two pretty meaningsless features. What Im proposing is making them meaningsful and in the same time being able to protect your planets a bit more and making the game a bit more realistic.
A military ring will have two new modules, one extra carrier module (so that it can get more fighters) and one called "Long range missiles". If a fleet or a ship enters a ZOC of a starbase with a military ring (and you dont have Open borders treaty) you will get this message " The com crackles with interference as a new message is repeated: Unidentified craft. You have now entered the ZOC of military base X. Please leave or we will be forced to answer with lethal force". If the player takes another step in that ZOC, a battle will start with the militare base (not visible) sending one volley of missiles (from the long range missile module) at your ships and you are forced to fight a battle with all the interceptors that the military base has. If you survive, this message will not appear again as long as you stay in the ZOC. If you leave and reenter or enter with another ship, it starts all over again.
Why this?
1. First and foremost, its more realistic. In GCIII you get a slight penalty to diplomacy when cruising in a military vessel in anothers space, IRL this means war or at least a shot down airplane.
2. You will be able to protect your borders in a completely different way, especially against all those constructors that runs the blockade and settles deep inside you zone of influence just to get a tiny Durantium mine (mt AI opponents do this all the times and it really get on my nerves).
3. People will actually start to use the military ring, a cool and totally unused feature today. The only time I used it was to invade a really heavily fortified planet so I quickly built a military base just to get the bonuses to attack.
Last but not least, you should be able to move your starbase. Who in their right mind builds a base without any means to move it, especially in a friction-less environment like space. Come on, even our own ISS is able to move slightly (I now, like a turtle, but sometimes it has to do course correction just to stay in the same place). Shipyards can move, to the same with the starbases.
So, what do you all say?