Noob colonizing question

[vonduus (OP)]

When I colonize a new uninhabitable planet, I first deploy some terraformers and construction brigades. After realizing that the construction engineers refuse to work on the terraformers (? - they assemble PDCs, and they work in CFs, but not in terraforming installations - ?), I ship in my terraformer platforms.

Then, when terraforming is well underway, I move some infrastructure to my new planet, and also some colonists, one batch is usually enough, then the commercial space lines take over.

And now my question: When security is taken care of, what are the most important installations to build? I know it depends on a lot of things, like the strategic position of the planet, what resources are available etc. And it depends a lot of how much production power you got in place. A brand new military academy would be nice, but it will take forever.

What are you guys building as the first installation on a new planet, all else being equal?

[Jorgen_CAB]

I like to build spaceports on planets that I intend to terraform and build up to a large colony. Spaceports will also help my civilian fleet to load and unload faster, at least I believe it does.

Otherwise I usually build on dedicated factory planets and move installation to where they are needed using civilian contracts or sometimes with my own freighters. Spaceports are the only structure you must build on site as far as I can remember.

[Conscript Gary]

To clarify what construction brigades can and can't do,
they act like they're a construction factory. They're not a population so they can't man any actual installations, but then they also ignore all the restrictions a population has like gravity or atmosphere or what have you. If you dropped off a construction factory for them to work in, it wasn't doing anything, they were on their own.

[vonduus (OP)]

Oh, so I misunderstood what Construction Brigades can do. Thanks for the information.

Resource rich planets of course get a lot of mines and factories, initially produced somewhere else, until they can take over their own replication.

But what shall I build on my "green" planets (those with no resources)? All that these colonies make is money, as far as I know, and that is why I have built Financial Centers. But looking at the economics tab, I find that the contribution of the FCs to the overall economy is infinitesimal, so it is probably a waste.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Producing FI can be somewhat beneficial depending on the resources you have. For starters they don't need any Duranium this mineral can be in short supplies quite often. So building FI can be useful for worlds where you don't want to put any mines.

In my current campaign though, Earth has such a big population I can't really get all the workers to work so Earth is my powerhouse factory and wealth producer and dwarf everything else by quite a margin. Now, this obviously depend on your staring condition. I started this campaign as a conventional start with a 7500 million inhabited Earth.