Choosing planets to colonize

[replicant2699 (OP)]

Hello,

I usually colonize Luna and Mars straightaway, just for the sake of population growth.   But now I'm finding lots of 2 cost planets as I explore the galaxy, I am not sure if I should colonize them all.   There are some good candidates which terraforming would make sense, a planet that is only missing 0.  5 atm oxygen for example.   I try to colonize any planet that has a cost lower than 2 since they're also good candidates for terraforming.   Also, none of my colonies have any kind of installation at the moment, it's just population for taxes.   I'll probably move some of the financial centres and shipyards to Luna soon since I'm about to have a worker shortage in Earth.   But apart from that, I cannot decide which planets should I colonize and in which of those should I build an industry, except planets with a fair amount of minerals.   How do you decide and what is your colonization/expansion strategy in general?

Edit: Another question: I send some infrastructure and population to newly colonized planets and leave the rest to the civilian sector.  But when I choose the "stable" option when the colony has about 30m pop so that it can grow by itself, they also stop hauling infrastructure to that colony.  Is there a workaround to this or should I produce and haul infrastructure myself after that point?

[Barkhorn]

I rarely colonize planets with no minerals; there's little point in my mind.  I look at what minerals I'm lacking, and focus my colonizing efforts on planets with them.  I especially like systems with sorium-bearing gas giants, so I can set up fuel harvesting operations and drop the fuel off at a nearby colony.  Every colony also gets a space port, which helps speed up loading and unloading.  For example, right now I have two manned colonies in the Los Angeles system.  Los Angeles A-2 is a terrestrial world with decent minerals and a 30% energy weapons ancient construct.  So I moved 16 research labs, 100 construction facilities, and 300 mines there.  Los Angeles A-4 is a gas giant with a ton of high accessibility sorium and many many moons.  I moved several fuel harvesters to it, and have a tanker ferrying fuel to Los Angeles A-2.  Los Angeles A-4 Moon 8 has good minerals, especially corundium, so I've moved many mines and construction factories there as well.  The benefit to corundium is that I can use it to make more mines.  I have mass drivers on LA A-4 Moon 8 sending resources to LA A-2, which also get used on more mines.  Periodically, I have a big freighter come and take all the produce to Earth.

[Cobaia]

I colonize everything with lower 10 colony cost and more than 500 pop limit

[Llamageddon]

As long as it has good minerals I've been colonising everything with a cost below about 2.5. It seems to get my civilian economy moving along nicely too. I find it very useful to move Refuelling Stations on to my periphery worlds to save time and fuel for my exploration craft and increase practical range of my freighters and colony ships. I find maintenance facilities to be a bit more tricky as you have to organise Shuttle Stations/Space ports and make sure they are supplied with Duranium, Uridium and Galicite (I think) so set I those up more strategically and ideally on a planet with those resources to hand to mine for themselves.

I often colonise a pretty pathetic planet if it is in a system with lots of high colony cost bodies with good mineral deposits so they can be the central hub for mass drivers sening materials from auto-mines; which goes hand in hand with what Barkhorn says about looking out for systems with gas giants that have good sorium deposits.

I'm always looking out for cost 1 or less worlds or planets with a very low terraforming cost though and obviously they are prioritised for major investments of materials and infrastructure/installations to eventually be a backup to or even better than my home system. I am still a bit a noob though, but that is just what I've been doing. Current game, not a single world under 2.0 colony cost in about 20 systems though, so I am being more abitious and less picky in my terraforming goals.

[db48x]

As with all things, it comes down to the benefit received for the cost expended. Terraforming a planet allows you to put more people there, but has a cost. Building infrastructure also has a cost, but frequently takes less time. Skoormit made a spreadsheet that calculates the cost of terraforming planets, so that you can pick the ones that are easiest to terraform. I also extended it to calculate how large the manufacturing sector could be on each planet. This is important because it determines how many facilities you'll be able to place there. You generally want the planets that are quick to terraform, can have a large manufacturing sector, and have lots of minerals. Not every planet meets all of those requirements, but the ones that do are worth the extra effort to find.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=11834.new

By design the civilian sector won't take colonists or infrastructure to colonies marked as 'Stable'; that's the whole point of having the setting. Set it to 'Destination' instead. The population will still build its own free infrastructure over time regardless of the setting.

[Llamageddon]

I got a bit lost on that spreadsheet, some of the abbreviation confuse me. I didn't realise populationms slowly build infrastructure but I've a few 2.0 planets that I just left a few construction factories on to keep producing infrastructure over time and let civillians fill up colonist capacity for me. I've sort of got the hang of it now, but I've actually colonised too many 2.0 CC planets I think. Now I've found a few very low cost world's, managing freight and colonists to all my other colonies is becoming a bit of a hassle. For some reason my civillian shipping companies are growing pretty slowly. They only have about 7 ships between them at the moment.

[Froggiest1982]

I got a bit lost on that spreadsheet, some of the abbreviation confuse me. I didn't realise populationms slowly build infrastructure but I've a few 2.0 planets that I just left a few construction factories on to keep producing infrastructure over time and let civillians fill up colonist capacity for me. I've sort of got the hang of it now, but I've actually colonised too many 2.0 CC planets I think. Now I've found a few very low cost world's, managing freight and colonists to all my other colonies is becoming a bit of a hassle. For some reason my civillian shipping companies are growing pretty slowly. They only have about 7 ships between them at the moment.

There is no right or wrong as it depends on how your game is developing. Keeping RP aside for a moment as it will change drastically your goals and general obvious reasons already stated in this thread a colony could be useful also for the following:

Academies - more crewmen and officers
Supply Outpost
First defensive line
Traffic Monitoring
Warehousing

[Llamageddon]

That's a good summary list of colony uses, thanks. I just explored my first ruin that gave me a tech bonus so I am overly excited to have an excuse to set up my first specialist research colony, I think it's a great addition to the game to give a non-RP reason to set up a specific colony. I'll porbably put an acedemy on it to be run by a scientist too. It's nice to have non-RP reasons to make specialist colonies.

My refuelling outposts are proving a very good investement too, but I'm having trouble finding planets with all the minerals to support a self-sufficient maintenance facility outpost unfortunately. As far as I can see there isn't an easy way to transport and unload MSP to a frontier outpost but I assume I am missing something.

[Gram123]

As people has already said this depends entirely on your game parameters.

At the moment I'm playing a game where i started out with 10000 conventional industry and nothing else, on a usual 500mio. population. This created some interesting dynamics, where the most needed resources for me was population as my manufacturing rate was terrible. So my primary objective was to keep my population growth as high as possible, while having plenty of minerals, and the entire deposit of earth was mined out before I could even transform my CI to construction factories/mines and so on. 

So I colonized just about every body that i could reasonable terraform or even just populate with infrastructure, as earth was soon down to pop growth of >4%.

In other games you have plenty of pop, so you only colonize to get acces to new mineral deposit. In yet other games, you colonize militaristic to cut of NPRs or, to control key systems.

[Llamageddon]

Thanks for all the info guys, I've kind of been going in circles with my questions, I know, but it's been edifying to get the various feedback from you all. I'll just have to put up with having overcolonised medium cost worlds, I'm sure they'll be useful once I have my freight/industry/terraforming up to speed on them all. I wish my civillian shipping companies were growing faster, I'm not sure what I've done differently on this game compared to others. I would have excpected them to grow faster, not slower, with all these small colonies to supply/trade with.

[Gram123]

I'm not entirely sure about this, but it seems to me that the growth of the civilian shipping lines are connected to how big increments you advance your game - especially in the early game. My hypothesis is that civilian ships only get a new order when you actually have a update, but the can get new orders in between production cycles.

So if you advance your early game 30 days at the time, they will only get a new order every 30 days, no matter if they go between earth and luna, and therefore will make a lot less money than if you advance, say, 1 day increments where they could make several trips in 30 days.

But this is just a theory...

[TheTalkingMeowth]

It's correct as far as I can tell. I almost always play 5 day increments for this reason.

A similar issue effects survey standing orders, where it won't issue a new one more than once per tick. This is why there are the "Survey next 3" orders; as long as it doesn't finish all three before the next tick, no time is lost.

[smoelf]

I'm not entirely sure about this, but it seems to me that the growth of the civilian shipping lines are connected to how big increments you advance your game - especially in the early game. My hypothesis is that civilian ships only get a new order when you actually have a update, but the can get new orders in between production cycles.

So if you advance your early game 30 days at the time, they will only get a new order every 30 days, no matter if they go between earth and luna, and therefore will make a lot less money than if you advance, say, 1 day increments where they could make several trips in 30 days.

But this is just a theory...

IIRC it was like this in VB6 as well. One of the reasons why I only use 30-day increments in the very early game and usually progress to 5-day and then 1-day increments in the mid-late game.