Colonizing other systems

[Baron Munchausen]

Wingte:
The ultimate colonizer, in the demo at least, is a medium transport. Fit it with basic equipment (ship control engines), a colonizing module, and fill the rest with cargo and/or supply (depending on the range you want). With level III cargo tech, you can make a colonizer that creates a colony II (200 million) on landing! Great stuff.

And, for you guys who just discovered putting a cargo module in a standard colony ship, there's really two options. The cargo module gives you a better starting population but you can also put a supply module in a get extended range. Very useful if you are reaching really hard for planets and systems. Also risky since you are putting your colony beyond help of your fleet. First facility you build had better be resupply. Early in the game, though, this might be the only way to get colonies out there where the scout ships and no others can reach. (Scouts, of course, are also full of supply modules and so can go further than a warship...)

[Lerchey]

Another thing to keep in mind. The default colony module carrys 4 m people. Some planets, though "colonizable" just flat out SUCK. Because of this, there *appears* to be a minimum required population to survive. I've had colonies on planets with the 4m starting, and next turn, they were toast. I then used transports to drop 20m or so on them, and they did just fine. I have not seen the code, but this has happened in a number of games, and I just thought it was a feature.
<shrug>

John

[Mike Tremblay]

There's lots of neat little things you can do when you design your ships using SE's component system. One of the advantages of having played SE3 is that I have a better understanding of how the ship design system works for SE4 - this helps since there is relatively little help, unless you go to Malfador's site and read the Q&A's or visit this forum, in playing the demo (must be frustrating for newbies).

This is probably the best ship designing system I have seen for this type of game - far and above the next competitor MOO2.

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Mike Tremblay
"Bitter Mike"

[AaronEdward]

Wingte, if you've been to a new system through the warp point, and have a map, you can simply select your colony ship and then change systems without losing the command interface for that ship, then instruct it to colonize a planet in that system, or you can manually load population and then colonize. personally, I colonize with the basics, a cargo facility, and then follow up with a medium transport under minister's control. The advantage of this is the transport operates on it's own, without micro-management, and the size of the colony grows almost immediatly without spending tons of credits on large colony ships. A colony ship is taken apart and used for the colony, but a population transport is reused.

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Treat Customers like family: exploit them.

[dumbluck]

The oldest post. cool

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