Do people actually build colony ships past the early game? I always just let civilian shipping do its thing.
I do, because I don't trust civilians to do exactly what I need them to, when I want them to. If I need ten million people on a planet yesterday, I'm not going to wait for the civvie to finish depopulating Mars or whatever.
Of course this especially applies to establishing colonies outside of the stable jump network which is often a necessity. Actually because of this, I would say at a certain point it starts to make more sense to make (new) colony ships jump-capable as this becomes the major use case.
E: Ninja'd by Steve post, the new Arks change is very neat. Steve, can you confirm that this fixes the long-standing complaint about using OrbHabs at planets like Venus? Prior to 2.0, OrbHab populations at Venus, etc. would build surface infrastructure and experience pop growth beyond the habitat capacity, leading to colonists on the surface which tanked the manufacturing efficiency of the entire colony. It sounds like with the new distinction between orbital and surface populations, this can no longer happen? So if we have 10m colonists in habitats at Venus, they will
not overflow to the surface and induce significant penalties to manufacturing efficiency.