Welcome, and don't worry about the Civ3 folks, I too got socked for 50 bucks.
This was one of the first questions I had to ask when I first came here over a year ago. The answer is as described by Tatbill.
The game has a very good HTML manual in the game folder. Also, the tutorials with the game cover a lot of the basics such as colonization.
But hey, you have already colonized those planets, now its time to put some people on them. You can build a transport, and upload population onto it and then move it to the colony world and transfer as many as you wish to that world. Sometimes, I build too many colony ships at one world, and send them all out at once. This depletes my population and several colonizers go out empty. I fix this by building transports, and filling them with population then go around dropping 5 million on each of my worlds.
After I done that, I turn the transports over to the MISINSTER, (The head in the icon bar on the Right.) and select and activate the TRANSPORT Minister from the MINISTER control window found in the CROWN icon on the Left. Open the CROWN, and click the minister button then find and check the Transports button. This and Intelligance is the only items I use ministers for.
Again, welcome to the game, and enjoy.
