[Lord Balzingo]

Well, duh! I've only had SEIV for less than a week, but I had fairly quickly figured out that sending a colony ship didn't necessarily mean sending any colonists. But I had stupidly assumed that I had to send a population transport along with the colony ship to establish the base population. As a consequence, all of my colonies started with 300M inhabitants, and as I put them on pretty hospitable worlds, I got great overall population growth. ButI was wondering how those other races managed to colonise without my ever seeing any transports, and why their colonies seemed so small. Duh. It didn't even occur to me to strip out some engines from my colony ship to make storage space!

As it turns out, my tactic (fast colony ships paird with fast population transports) was good for getting large colonies quickly in distant systems, but I wonder if I'd have done so if I'd known!