ship gather point?

[Fyron]

Its a mod setting, in Data\Settings.txt. It basically creates free population on every newly colonized world. At one point, this population was always the native type for your empire. This screwed up colonization of different-atmosphere planets with aliens, since it would add a few million oxygen breathers to methane worlds where you had loaded methane breathers on your colony ship. This is primarily why some mods, such as BM, set the value to 0. There was talk of a fix, where it would instead add pop of the type on the colonizer (if there was any), but I don't recall if it made it into a patch or not.

[Dogboy]

Ah, ok. Thanks!

[BlueTemplar]

The AI (if activated) will scrap the problematic population on the next turn, right?

Wouldn't a simpler fix be to only add population when there was none on the cololizer to start with?

[Captain Kwok]

There was a fix for the auto-colonization amount some time ago. The auto-colonization amount is only used now if there is no other population on the colonizer. Since that change, the Balance Mod has 1M as the auto-colonization amount.

[Dogboy]

Odd! I am playing SE5 v1.74 with Balance Mod v1.14b and my colonizers all come up empty. Does that mean I can just send empty colonizers out and they will colonize with 1M of my colonists?

[Captain Kwok]

If you give your colonizer the colonize order when it's in orbit of a planet, it will attempt to automatically pick up population from the planet prior to moving to its target. It sounds like you might be using the move order and then the colonize order afterwards. In that case, your ship's won't pick up any population, but the auto-colonization amount will kick in.

[Dogboy]

Wow! So, if I have a shipyard set to automatically send built colonizers on to a way point, I don't have to worry about loading colonists: I can just let them accumulate at the way point, and then issue the colonization order, and they'll have a few colonists?? I guess this avoids the newbie error of moving and then colonizing. Cool!

[capnq]

Captain Kwok said: If you give your colonizer the colonize order when it's in orbit of a planet, it will attempt to automatically pick up population from the planet prior to moving to its target.

It will attempt to pick up population whether it's orbiting a planet or not, even if it's already fully loaded. The Colonize order always produces the orders "Load All Populations; Move to <target>; Colonize <target>".

I've never given the Colonize order to an empty colonizer in the same sector as a loaded population transport, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took that population if there was no planet to draw from.