So. How much population and industrial capacity do you transport to your colonys before you start having them build their own mines, shipyards, factorys, ships, etc. Currently it's rather unfeasible for me, as a colony w/ 17 mil and 600 infrastructure has a N/A usually on every project i put in.
What is your colony cost for that planet? The really important question is "Is it ~2.0, or is it a lot more than 2.0, or is it almost zero (compared to 2.0)?" If the answer is not "almost zero", then you need a LOT more infrastructure. You can tell this by going to the summary tab of the F2 screen and looking for the "Supported Population" value. If it's a lot less than 17 mil, then you're basically shoving people out the airlock and waiting for them to die off. In that case, they'll be a bit peeved, and not really interested in working in your factories
The reason I ask is the numbers you gave above. I just looked at my Mars colony; it has colony cost 2.0, ~16 mil population and ~3200 infrastructure. So unless your colony cost is something like 0.4 or less, you don't have enough infrastructure on your planet.
The way it should work is that even after 1 factory (or 1 engineering regiment), you should be able to start building things - it will just take a loooooooong time. A "raw" factory (no industry tech researched or factory bonus for governor) produces 10 units per year and costs 120 units to build, so it takes twelve years to clone itself. (Side remark: this is why it's so important to research industrial and mining efficiency as early as possible, since this doubling time sets an upper bound on the exponent in your economic growth.) Think of it another way: if you have 1000 factories on your homeworld and 10 on your colony, it will take 100 times as longer to build something on the factory than on the homeworld. This is why fractional shipping (e.g. of research labs and terraformers) is so important - in the old days only factories and mines could be shipped and so everything else had to be built on the colony. Nowadays, it's a lot quicker to build things like research labs at home and ship them to the world. With this in mind, the limiting resource on a colony world tends to be available workers - you need to decide whether you're going to use those 1m workers for a research lab that you've shipped over, or for 20 factories/mines.
Another thing to be aware of: in terms of industrial cost vs. shipping volume, infrastructure is stupendously inefficient. A freighter that can carry one factory or mine (cost 120) can only carry 10 infrastructure (cost 20) IIRC. So up until very recently I had my Mars colony producing infrastructure; I'd build the factories and mines on the home world and ship them over.
Yet another thing to think about: When civie production of infrastructure came in, that changed the above calculation. Now the civies will build infrastructure and ship it for you, along with the colonists. So you can concentrate on building factories and mines. This is why I've been nagging Steve about the creation of civie lines - I don't have any yet and so I'm being forced to build my own infrastructure and not take advantage of the trade opportunities with Mars.
Hope that helps....
John
