Is there any real point in designating a colony as 'mining', etc?

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by dogscoff:
What happens if an AI gets hold of one of my planets? Will it re-designate the planet or does it just build facilities according to what I designated?

The AI will never redesignate a planet. We consider this one of its major flaws. When it's running low on a resource it won't look and see if a current colony generating an exces of some other resource has a decent level of the short resource and could be converted. It will just force the next new colony to be whatever type it needs, regardless of the planet's value in that resource.