Increasing Colony Limit

[Darkaiser]

How do you increase your Colony limit past 5? I can see nothing in the tech wikki and I know you can do it because I see AI races with 6+ planets.

Thanks in advance.

[Disturbed]

You have to create sectors to colonize further worlds. Moreover there is or was a tech which allows you directly more controlled planets. The effect is called "core sector limit +1".

[antonn]

but colonies in sectors

[Noanmus]

In terms of the limit itself there is a late game repeatable tech for it, there are also government types which start with a bonus to the limit. The important part is to create sectors, preferably on planets close to home with all building rights disabled, this will hand them over to the sector and not count them to the limit in return for a lack of control over what they build and an increase in their ethics divergence.

[HugsAndSnuggles]

There is no colony limit, there is core systems limit. What you feed to sectors does not count towards your core planet cap, but you won't be able to manage surface of those planets. Core system limit can be increased by some goverment forms and techs.

[Wulfenburg]

You can increase core planets by a few research options. On top of that, if you have more then one habitable planet in system it only counts as one :) So make sure to keep that in mind! If you want to play sometime feel free to add me, I can try to explain some stuff better if you have any questions!

[Miro Laaksonen]

In addition, you can have extra systems in your control, it only gives you -10% penalty on energy credits and influence gain per system.
I usually have one extra. Not sure if it's worth it but whatever.

[Summanus]

I cheated a bit and modded my game so that I can have 10 systems under direct control instead of 5. I'm much happier with it that way :)

[Crytek]

Mods.

[Nachtmahr]

With a spiritiual Form of Goverment you are able to start with 7 core systems. then you can invent up to +5 core systems under direct control. each system over the core cap you get penalty for Energy, happyness and so on. Solution: Research BIO and the use of sectors under controll of a goveneur.

[LordOfPants]

The developers want you to use sectors, personally I've started using a mod to give me unlimited core systems because the sector AI is just bad.

I recommend the auto build and improve buildings mod, which lets you keep your planets as core but does the annoying upgrades for you (and will try to manage planets for you if you let it). http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=691008512

I also had this one work fine for just increasing the cap:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=682336292

[Wulfenburg]

I admit I kindof like the sector system. You just need to make sure each sector has enough materials in it's area which can be difficult at times depending on planet locations. But I think it makes the game play more interesting.

[LordOfPants]

I don't like the sector system. The AI is bad, just feeding it resources doesn't stop it from doing things like scrapping happiness buildings or freeing all the slaves for a decadent collectivist. You often have to create weird sector borders, and can only correct them by spending more influence than it would cost you to spread new colonies. For something that's supposed to offload micro-management, you have to click an awful lot - one click for every hundred minerals or energy dropped into a sector. And you don't want them self-sufficient, because that means they'll accumulate mineral and energy that your empire can never use. You can't tweak what the AI is doing on a plane without burning up influence either. Because the AI is pretty random with developing buildings, you can't really get a good feel for how much a sector will produce for the empire.

If sectors were easier to give sensible borders to and tweak, had decent governor AI, didn't require hundreds of clicks to fuel, had stockpiles that were useful for the empire, and gave reasonably predictable benefit as they developed, I'd like them as a way to manage the empire. But they just don't work well and are more trouble than microing all of the planets, especially if you get a mod that offloads some of the upgrade spam like the one I linked to.

[Wulfenburg]

What I do is fully build the system before turning it into a sector if I can, or atleast close to it. I insure they don't get rid of any building I've already created. Would the mod even work playing multiplayer? because that would leave other players at a huge disadvantage.

[angel of derp]

Not quite a "Colony", but taking over lesser developed species by replacing their leadership with secret agents of your species... this gives you another world and does not count against your Colony cap (or at least it worked that way when I did it).

(I was motivated because they were on the cusp of space flight, and then they put a satelite over their world. So it was time to move on these primitives before they got too strong.)

No tech advances or anything, I got to 6 planets. Definitely a reason to put those Observation satelites out there!

[^Kevin^]

in starting my second game I figured that the most important thing I was concerned about was core planet limits, so I picked the gov't type that gave +5, playing on iron-mode to allow me to get the achievemenets, and when I was able to get advanced gov't I was able to boost this number another +5, (it saysa +10 but that is after you lose your old gov't type so lose the +5 from it), these were the best options I have found so far for increasing your planet core limit to and don't need to use mod's to do it. Concievably with the right tech I could increase that even further than the 15. So far I haven't had a need to create any sectors, but I will probably start doing that cause I'm hitting that 15 system limit already in my current iteration of the game.