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

[dmm]

You could call your designs MyFarm, MyMineral, etc. Then it would be easy to pick out the new colonies.

[Rollo]

Originally posted by Marvin Kosh:
Does this mean we can make our own files, so the ministers are actualy useful?

i.e. we could designate our own 'blueprint' for a farming colony design, if we really don't need much organics and would rather use the space for a heckuva lot of research facilities or storage. Then we just have to actually select it. In simultaneous games I get annoyed that the AI picks the wildest sort of function for my colonies. Maybe I want to designate my new colonies myself, at the start of the turn they were colonised.... kinda hard to pick them out when they already have one set....

Yes, you can do that. What is being built on a planet you can set in the ..._AI_construction_facilities.txt, the designation of new colonies is governed by the ..._AI_PLanet_types.txt. Rather than editing one or more of the races you could make a new folder under SE4/AI (that's the folder that has the folders .../aggressive, ../neutral, ../defensive in it). Call it SE4/AI/mystyle or whatever. When you create your empire you can then choose "mystyle" for the minister.
BTW, if you don't like the choice of the minister about a new colony, you can set a new type in the planets screen. there is a button "change colony type" or some such.

Hope that helps,
Rollo

[Elowan]

These responses seem to answer another of my 'newbie' questions, namely: do you use Ministers routinely and why?

[Krsqk]

There's also the "Display Select Colony Type dialog when colonizing planet" toggle under Empire Options, which defaults to on, IIRC. Does the Colonization Minister override that?

[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?

[capnq]

do you use Ministers routinely and why?

No, because I get far better results by micromanaging everything myself.

The only exceptions are:

• when I'm running a test game and don't want to bother with the things I'm not testing; and
• the Turn Blitz #1 game on Play-By-Web {link}, where you can't avoid using them. (Said game is still looking for players, BTW.)

[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.