How Long do you Rely on your Home Planet?

[Borealis4x (OP)]

About how long in the game does it take for you to finally stop relying on your home planet for everything from ships to installations? Between terraforming and minerals it seems like I'll never have a planet that can provide even a fraction of what Earth can, making me either question my skills as a player or the point of colonizing things in the first place.

Bismark was right, a place in the sun is overrated!

[Erik L]

I expand out in my home system, putting down mining colonies (or archaeological digs) on appropriate worlds.

Once outside my system, I tend to build a nodal colony 3-4 jumps from home. These usually become sector capitals. Biggest criteria is having a decent amount of all of the minerals.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

How do you deal with fuel issues with your explorers? It is making me very hesitant to explore past one jump because dealing with it is a pain.

[Iranon]

Only an issue if you make it one. Mine get ~0.3 power engines and enough fuel for a few years (about half their deployment time).

[ty55101]

How do you deal with fuel issues with your explorers? It is making me very hesitant to explore past one jump because dealing with it is a pain.

First, make sure you at least have nuclear pulse before going into another system.  Second, all explorers should have maximum fuel efficiency.  Here is a design in a game I am playing right now;

Code: [Select]

Hospitaller class Geological Survey Vessel    3 700 tons     55 Crew     386 BP      TCS 74  TH 300  EM 0
4054 km/s     Armour 1-21     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/2     Damage Control Rating 1     PPV 0
MSP 65    Max Repair 100 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 48 months    Spare Berths 0   

300 EP Commercial Ion Drive (1)    Power 300    Fuel Use 7.07%    Signature 300    Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 250 000 Litres    Range 172.0 billion km   (491 days at full power)

Geological Survey Sensors (2)   2 Survey Points Per Hour

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes

Although, I usually send a tanker in the system at the same time.

[Erik L]

How do you deal with fuel issues with your explorers? It is making me very hesitant to explore past one jump because dealing with it is a pain.

Automation. Set up conditional orders to refuel at 50%. Build fuel dumps as you expand.

[TT]

I build fuel harvesters comtinuously from the start.  I put a huge tf of the in sol and then additional ones throughout the galaxy toact as fuel dumps. Like a number of the posters have mentioned, I also build fuel efficient ships. I actually do most of myexporing with fuel efficient fighter craft. They are slow but I have penty and I don't stress losing a few every once in awhile.

[83athom]

It usually takes about 50-100 years before you are no longer able to rely on Earth for all your mineral needs (depends on starting size and how aggressive you build up). Venus usually contains vast amounts of materials that won't run out for centuries even with thousands of mines. Civilian mining does help a lot of times (you just have to remember to actually pick up the material). For your first colonies, you would want to prioritize planets that are easy to colonize but have other bodies in system with large amounts of materials (so you can stick auto-mines and mass drivers on to send resources to the colony). However more benefits colonies have is luxury resource generation and tax revenue, so Mars and Luna (and other bodies similar in colonizing cost) are still good to grab even though they may not have resources (but as a secondary).

I do a few things for the fuel situation.
1) Fuel harvesters/dumps in forward systems with gas giants.
2) Efficient engines(0.3 to 0.5 on commercial, and 0.8 to 1.2 on military {except fighters and FACs}).
3) I usually put a Sorium Harvester on exploratory ships.

[MarcAFK]

I only seriously start moving industry away from earth when I find a system with millions of every resource at high accessibility. Untill then everything gets shipped back to earth, except for maintenance bases, fuel harvesting platforms, and semi sufficient colonies which receive mininerals for factory or mine expansion.