Help! Colonies Not Working

[John-SJ]

I'm currently trying to figure out the demo. I have followed the tutorial and built a colony in my home sector. But when I try to build a colony in another sector the population always shows 0/500M or similar, but the population is always 0.

I even tried an experiment. I built a colony ship, saved the game, then sent it to a planet in my home sector. TaDa! I get a population of 4M. Then I reload the game and send the same ship to another sector to colonize. Population - 0M!

What am I doing wrong? Why can I only colonize in my home sector?

Thanks for your help!

John-SJ

[geoschmo]

You have to make sure you load population on the ship before it leaves your homeworld. Most likely you are hitting the colonoze button within your home system, but when colonizing out of your system you are hitting the warp button to move to that system and then the colonize button. the colonize button will automatically load pop and then move to the planet. If you are going to use the move button or warp you have to manually load pop before you do.

[John-SJ]

Thanks! That of course was the problem.

John-SJ

[Tomgs]

Another tip put a cargo bin on your colonizer that way you can take 34 pop with you to colonize that new planet. Up to 54 if you have cargo III researched.

[Taqwus]

Aye. Early game, that extra 20kt could be used well for cargo; it's not like any armor or weapon by itself is going to save it in a fight...

...late game, if you've set colonization on Minister, which currently isn't too clued about such things like supply (even w/ Resupply minister on as well), adding a Solar Collector works quite well if not perfectly (they still *may* run out of supply), and is cheaper than a QR.

By the time your Ministers are colonizing far enough away for this to be an issue, you should be able to also have solar-powered population transports (PopTarts) to the lower pop of a colony pod doesn't matter much.

(And if you're Organic w/ Replicant Centers, put only 1M on each pod, doing so manually, and build the Replicant Center in each system if you haven't already. You'll get vast pop growth for free once a Center is in the system.)

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night