Fast Fast colonization

Cheeeeesyyyyy

But yeah what can you do. The new system which should lower early colony rush does not seem to be working all that well. AI spawns like crazy. They usually grab 2x as much planets as I do, but I beat em in the end still. AI set on tough.

Hi!

when its there, upgrade it to a colony ship

But then it is without population. Are you able to colonize with 0 pop? How the colony looks like if you can?
BR, Iztok

Why not just build a ship with lots of engines, life support, and a colony module to begin with?

Because you can only fit so much on a cargo class design.

Yeah wouldn't you have zero population on the refitted ship? That's awfully weird that it's even able to claim the planet, also you're going to have to send colonists eventually because the new population growth mechanism means a small colony barely grows at all. A colony that only starts with .1 population, years later, will have maybe .3 population.

yes I tried it. its a planet with 0 population and FULL production capability! thus proving that population has no bearing research or production. being able to completely ignore the popularity contest early on was a great advantage.

the next step was making a colony way station to fill my fully built "empty" planetsl


early on I was able to net a planets far beyond the other civs, and was able to crush them with an influence victory. ( I was trapped in the corner with some fast spreading civs completely surrounding me.)

Very, very nice! This is about claiming territory, not growing your pop, so 1 pop is fine. In fact you get more pop growth by not having anyone in stasis on a colony ship.

The real usefulness of this strategy depends on how much it costs to upgrade and whether you can afford to wait three weeks.

In fact, you could send out all empty hulls and upgrade them to constructors, freighters, or colony ships as the need arose.

yes I tried it. its a planet with 0 population and FULL production capability! thus proving that population has no bearing research or production. being able to completely ignore the popularity contest early on was a great advantage. the next step was making a colony way station to fill my fully built "empty" planetsl

Lol. I'm picturing the first "real" colonists arriving on one of these planets, finding complete but eerily empty cities and factories all autobuilt for them. And the .3 population already on the planet turns out to be the mutated, feral descendants of the original ship's cats!

I think that if you have an empty colony ship build a colony, all of the building decisions for that planet should be made by the AI until the colonists arrive! I can see the Made For 4DTV movie about their journey now: "The Twilight Planet--After three months in stasis, they landed in a paradise... gone horribly awry!"

I just imagine it as if my colony ship had just a flag, and a cargo hold full of constructor robots.

After having ranted in another thread about what *isn't* cheese, I think I have to agree that this one is. Staking claim on a planet with an empty ship? No, that's silly. A planet simply shouldn't colonize if the ship doesn't have at least 1 person on it.

If you do this with a ship that starts off as a colony ship, well............ If I see an alien colony ship heading for a high PQ planet that I'm going for, I'll do a quick upgrade to give it more engines. Probably cheese, but I do it anyway.

That's what sucks about the whole idea of cheese. I think this is brilliant. They should do like in Magic: the Gathering. Players find way more combos between cards than the developers can, but if they find one that's broken (win on the first turn), the developers put out a ban on that one that goes into effect the next month. So it's perfectly legal until they say it's not legal, and people don't have to restrain themselves. If this effect is bad for the game, let's have them change the game.

Does adding multiple engines make it move that many more tiles? I thought there was no reason to add more than one engine...

Why don't you try finding out for yourself?

(Yes, it makes you go faster.)

Multiple engines are life. My Huge hulls take 6 Hyperwarp III's each.   

Anyway, I'm inclined to point out that Colony Ships have crews. The people running the ship claim the planet. Duh.

Rather than resort to this cheese, you can extend your range with a starbase.

Well hope they fix this. Kinda lame. Then again 0 pop planets= no taxes.

Ps I thought it was common knowledge that Pop has no effect of Research or Production? Taxes and Budget effect those. And 0 pop planets give no taxes.

Sorry for posting this here, but how in the heck do you create a new post in this forum? I keep getting an error message when trying to do this, I suspect due to the Topic dropdown being empty.

Speed is key, however, I build colony ships with 1 colony module and the rest engines anyway. Lack of a colony module will get me an extra engine or two. Might be worth it, but I don't see a huge advantage, something to try. Thanks for mentioning it.

The ship still has crew, it just doesn't have millions of people in stasis. So you have several thosands of people there instead of billions.

Pop never had any implication on production, never did. Its how many factories you have, many factories today are fully automatic, requiring only observers (and some not even that).
Population determines you TAX income. If you colonize too much and your pop doesn't keep up you have to pay more on building maintenance (without any actual productions) then you get from tax and you end up in terrible debt.

All that being said, it is cheesy. Not because of the people (there is the ships crew), or the construction, but because you get some unidentified corporation to build an entire colony for you (since you didn't take any colonizing equipment) and it is instantly created there isntead of being shipped from your nearest planet.