Infrastructure and a Colony

[davidr (OP)]

If i set down a Colony on a planet which needed infrastructure for survival , then shipped in a first ship load of colonists , would i personally have to produce the infrastructure from then on , or would the civilian shipping lines take it on themselves , when shipping colonists , to also provide  infrastructure ?  In essence do i have to use my own industry to manufacture infrastructure for my colony or can i leave it to the AI.

DavidR

[Elvin]

You can leave it all to the AI, although they'll only ship infrastructure that is "naturally" produced on your existing colonies. See the Trade Goods section for how much is being produced (and, more importantly, available for export).

So once you have a few large colonies set up and stable, you'll probably have enough infrastructure being produced naturally to not worry about it anymore (asides from an initial seeding perhaps), but in the early game you'll definitely need to build a lot of your own infrastructure.

[Zincat]

That does make for a slow colonization though.

Another thing to keep in mind. Once you terraform a planet that had a lot of infrastructure on it, all of that infrastructure is freed up. You can then either move it elsewhere with your freighters, or have the civilians ship it with a contract.

[Droll]

Thats why when seeding you drop a large initial infrastructure so as to not compromise speed. What I like to do is drop a bunch of infrastructure and just let civilian shipping drop colonists over time.

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

A TN start gives you 100 infrastructure, which is enough to support a 1/2 million population on Luna.  At that short distance civilians will happily ship over Earth's entire automatic infrastructure production, quickly ramping them up for other work.  Luna also terraforms quickly, so if you don't mind spending some starting BP on a decent orbital terraforming station, you will soon have plenty of free infrastructure to seed the rest of Sol with.  It is not necessary to ever build infrastructure or move colonists yourself once civilian shipping is available as you can just order existing infrastructure to be moved and they will take care of the rest.

LG infrastructure is a different story, as Earth doesn't produce any and there are no good LG seed worlds in Sol, with Vesta, Pallas, and Ceres coming the closest.