Totally lost on colonization...

[LizardSF (OP)]

So I am trying to colonize Mars.  I took a colony ship and gave it orders to pick up colonists on Earth and dump them on Mars, and that worked.  I then wanted to build infrastructure, so I selected that, and dedicated 100% of industry to it. . .  and I noticed I need 2 duranium(?).  (2 of something that began with "D", in any event. ) I managed to bring a pile of that from Earth in a freighter.  However, the "time to complete" continued to be "NA".  I couldn't find any way to get my lazy-ass colonists to start building, and, meanwhile, they kept dying.

I'd say "What am I doing wrong?", but I think the question is more "What 47 things am I doing wrong?"

(I've been playing SE5 for a bit when I discovered Aurora. . .  SE5 is like Candyland compared to this. . . )

I'm also getting a lot of bugs/crashes/error messages, which I did not screenshot/write down.  I will do that and file them in the appropriate place.

[chrislocke2000]

In order to build anything you need manufacturing installations. At the start of the game you will have a pile of these sat on Earth already so what you need to do is build the infrastructure on Earth and then ship it to Mars. You will need a freighter to do this.

On the colony summary tab, about half way down on the left hand side you will see some stats that show how much infrastructure you need to support a million colonists and how much you have. You need to make sure you build and deliver the infrastructure before you send the colonists to Mars! If you do it the other way round they will all die.

[Ashery]

Colonists don't have any base production. The only way you can produce infrastructure yourself is to use either construction factories (require 50k workforce per) or engineer brigades (act like automated mines). So, basically, you'd need to produce the infrastructure on Earth and ship the finished product to Mars instead of shipping the raw materials.

However, note that Earth produces a ton of infrastructure in trade goods. Your freighters don't have access to it, but once your civilian shipping lines get up and running they'll start making infrastructure runs that cost you nothing (In fact, you make a bit of a profit off of'em).

Also, generally one drops infrastructure before colonists (You've probably noticed that by now, heh).

[LizardSF (OP)]

Thanks for the help.

Is this covered in the tutorials? I didn't see it.