Is this colony worth terraforming?

[Jumpp (OP)]

It's early, August 2028. I've found an anomaly site that gives a 90% bonus to sensors. It's on a site with a colony cost of 53.2, and will require ~8 atmospheres of terraforming to make it habitable.

Near as I can figure, the effort required to terraform it far exceeds the payoff. With 8 atmospheres of terraforming, I could terraform most of the Sol system.

To make a real research site out of it, I'd need something like 50m-80m colonists, which makes orbital habs seem impractical.

Anyone got any idea about how I might get some net benefit from this anomaly?

[AL]

Haven't really done this myself yet, but for the more extreme environments sometimes the best way to go is through some genetic engineering to fit the environment better.

[Jumpp (OP)]

More detail may be helpful: The planet has a base temp of 616K, an albedo of 0.86, 7 atmospheres of CO2 and 0.4 atmosphers of NO2.

To make that habitable, I'd have to add 0.1 oxygen, take away all the CO2, and add ~0.5 of anti-greenhouse gas.

Raising the temperature tolerance of my people wouldn't significantly change the picture here. The surface temp is 1315 C.

[Sematary]

Infrastructure is your friend. Build some of it, transport some colonists there and let your civilian shipping take care of it.

[Jumpp (OP)]

5324 infrastructure required per million pop. Figure I'd need 50 million pop there to make this worth doing. So that's 50 * 53424 * 2 =  ~532,000 duranium.

Can't imagine it's worth it to get about 1/6 of my tech at half price. Is there a cheaper way to exploit this thing?

[Sematary]

Civilian stuff builds infrastructure for free.

[AL]

Just got ninja'd, but yeah, civilians also produce their own infrastructure. In some of my earlier games my colony on Mercury was producing tens of thousands of infrastructure free for me to ship off anywhere that needed it.

[Jumpp (OP)]

Okay, that's super interesting. What do I have to do? How do I get a colony to create free infrastructure? Do I need to hope that a civilian mining colony sets up shop there or something?

If these seem like odd questions, I've got a blind spot I should mention: In my early games, I ran low on Duranium from building infrastructure. Also, I got fed up with constant complaints about overcrowding. So I got in the habit of terraforming to cost 0 before landing the first colonist.

So I'm not clear on exactly how to do what you suggest. Can you explain it like I'm five?

[GreatTuna]

Colonies (with actual people, just adding, empty colonies produce nothing) produce infrastructure as trade good constantly. It gets turned into actual infrastructure when there's need. Production is shown on Wealth\Trade tab, every colony, even most smallest, produce infrastructure.

I get complaints about overcrowding all the time, but on the colonies where I need working workers I also put the Military, they put out any unrest. Terraforming works, but not always, sometimes there's not enough temperature to make colony fully habitable and sometimes there's things like on second attachment.

Also, civilian shipping SHIPS civilian infrastructure to overcrowded\almost overcrowded colonies, so your average Venus if you put any citizens here will turn into infrastructure sink, while also making all freighters busy.

[Jumpp (OP)]

Awesome. Thanks.

Unrelated question: That game there, the one that's in the year 2216, with a staggering number of colonies...when you push the "5 days" button, how long does it take to generate the turn, and how often do you get it to advance more than a day?

[GreatTuna]

Not very often. Interrupts from certain spoiler are common.

Stopwatch says the time to generate the turn is 3 minutes 40 seconds.

[sloanjh]

Warning Will Robinson:

  For high colony-cost planets, you also need to pay attention to the percentage of workers who will actually do something useful - it goes down as the colony cost goes up.  Did your 50 million pop number take this into account?  If not, you might want to check on this....

  I remember the first time I put a colony on Venus.  Had big labor shortages and didn't understand why until I realized everyone was working on the environmental support systems.

John