How do I create productive colonies in exo systems?

[bjrs551]

Ran through the tutorial, which was good as far as it went, but when I set up colonies in virgin systems I could not start producing anything. Tried to set up a space port and the queue says "never". I have no minerals in the system to build, and the game will not let me put any in a cargo bay, built a mineral mining ship, put it in the system, no joy. Tried emergency build, nothing. How do you build a space port in a new system?

[ekolis]

Do you have any population on your colonies? They won't do anything without population. Typically population will be loaded automatically when you order a colony ship to colonize, but there are situations where that won't happen, like if you order the ship to move somewhere that doesn't have population to load before you order it to colonize.

[bjrs551]

Oops, 3 exo colonies, zero pop in each. Kinda hard to produce anything that way. I was expanding after the tutorial, that may be why. I'll try a regular game and see what happens. Thanks!

[Kiesnowski]

One of the really dumb things that i did when I first started was to forget to load population onto my colony ships before I sent them out. If you forget you can always build a cargo ship to change population around on the planets. Use you homeworld an offload your excess population. Your efficiency will increase.

[pgames-food]

hmm i wonder if there is a way to "mod" the standard colony ship, so that it always has 2 population? :) (just pretending that the pilot and co-pilot would need to live there too) :o)

"oh no we forgot the crew, oh well, i guess we'll just have to re-populate the entire planet"

[ekolis]

I think there's a setting in settings.txt called something like Automatic Colonization Population which gives new colonies a certain amount of population in the event that no population was present on the colony ship. Or maybe that's only in SE5?

[pgames-food]

Originally posted by ekolis:

I think there's a setting in settings.txt called something like Automatic Colonization Population which gives new colonies a certain amount of population in the event that no population was present on the colony ship. Or maybe that's only in SE5?

ah ok thanks,

[pgames-food]

cool it was set to 0 currently :)
might be something interesting to try out :)

Automatic Colonization Population := 0

[CaptainKwok]

Originally posted by ekolis:

I think there's a setting in settings.txt called something like Automatic Colonization Population which gives new colonies a certain amount of population in the event that no population was present on the colony ship. Or maybe that's only in SE5?

This was an SE5 feature in direct response to the original poster's issue of forgetting to load population on the colonizer. Giving the ship a "Colonize" order includes a pick up of population at the starting location rather than using the "Move To" order. If you're using your colony ships to scout in SE4 just be sure to load them up with population first!

[pgames-food]

yeah its easy to do that sometimes