You are absolutely right about the colony ship dispatch not being as stated. I finally cut my units per colony in half and stopped going bankrupt before turn 30. About turn 30-32 the queueing ahead multiple items finally stopped for some reason. As of turn 36 I had 105 colonies, 34 colony ships, 19 non colony ships, and 7 colony ships came out turn 37, leaving only two colony ships in the build queues. But 9 colonies planted to make a total of 10 + 104 planted. The rule had changed yet again! It is now colony/2 versus ships. So it is obvious that as the game progresses there is a rule set used by the colonization minister to limit your colonization rate by not dispatching ships when built. Note that you will probably NOT see this unless the number of ships built is significantly less than colonies planted and you have lots of colony ships under minister control. Now I am just about SURE that the AI does not suffer this handicap. It is a PENALTY laid on lazy players by Aaron to discourage use of the managers!! I have one more tweak to do to my build queue since I am about to go bankrupt at turn 38. Hopefully the next adjustment will get me past 60.

OTOH it occurs to me that possibly I have found a lost colony ship bug in the colonization minister since some of those colony ships are really old. Perhaps one of the beta testers would care to comment ? Running my savegame needs the map9a and the patch it does to add giant planets, plus the attached AI files in the next post - have to do a zip.

So far as scheduling facilities before ships/units goes, there is a problem. One of the first things an unprotected colony needs before ANYTHING else is a weapons platform. That has a higher priority than ANY facility. So you have to do the tedious cross checking I suggested from the ship minister....

[This message has been edited by LCC (edited 12 July 2001).]