Newbie question

[Fenris]

I'm currently playing the demo, and I ran into one small problem:

I can create colonies in my home system without problems. But whenever I send a colony ship through a warp point, my colonies won't start. I go to a planet with a red or green asterisk above it, click on the 'colonize' button, and the colony is created. But the population is '0' and whenever I try to build somethning there, it never gets done.

Now I know I'm missing something obvious that everyone else knows, and I hate to use forums to ask rookie questions like this 'cause I know I'll get flamed back to the stone age. But I'm trying very hard to get excited about this game, and I can't get too far into it without some help here.

Thanks.

[Cryptotec88]

When you hit "c" or the Colonize button then click on the planet you want to colonize, the game automatically loads 4M of your people and then sends the ship off to the destination. At least that is the way it normally works. (Works great for me, full or demo.)
You can load the colonists yourself by clicking on the colony ship then hitting "T" or the Transport button and loading the colonists onboard yourself, then telling it to colonize the planet.

Cryptotec88

[Lerchey]

Fenris,

You are, inadvertently, sending empty colony ships.

There are three ways to "fix" this:

1) When your colony ship is still in orbit, don't use the "move" or "warp" buttons to send it colonizing. Use the "colonize" button, click on the target sector, then click on the target planet. It will autoload colonists and head off to colonize.

2) Click on the "load cargo" button before telling it to move, and load population from the planet. That will load up colonists, then you can fly around to whereever and colonize at your leisure.

3) Build a transport with lots of cargo containers, load population at the homeworlds, and then drop population on your empty colonies.

Hope this helps,

John

[Ferendra]

Hi Fenris,
you are not alone out there.
I (am) was new to SE, and made the same *mistake*
Have Fun
Ferendra

[Toastchee]

How do you attack planets? What can you do to an enemy's planets? Control them, blockade them, bomb them, plague them - What are all these tings?

[Taqwus]

You attack planets just like any ship/unit -- move into their square and confirm combat. You do have to watch for weapon platforms and satellites, however (always check the Cargo tab of a defender's planet, and of his transports and carriers), and certain weapons are better (e.g. planetary napalm only hits planets and WPs, but it does a *lot* more damage than standard anti-ship weapons).

Nasty things you can do to colonies and planets include...

- Destroy the colony outright, by attacking with weapons.
- Destroy only the colonists themselves, not facilities, via neutron bombs. Useful before invasion.
- Destroy only certain facilities, via smart bombs.
- Invade the colony with troops (note: quite difficult, it seems. Not sure what the rules are here).
- Cause it to join you, or form its own side, via espionage ('Puppet Political Parties').
- Blockade it, by simply remaining in orbit (which slows its production, IIRC, and should deny its resources to the owning empire; it should probably also make it unhappy).
- Drop plague bombs on it, which causes plague (which causes mass death and corresponding unhappiness every turn until cured or colony wiped out. Nasty, especially if your opponent never bothered to research even Biology and it's Plague V...)
- Destroy the planet, IIRC, using tectonic bombs.
- Destroy the planet and everything else in the entire system, by either exploding a star (into a nebula) or collapsing one (into a black hole).

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night