Building Colonies???HELP!

dumbluck · #1 April 29th, 2002, 02:01 PM

You can build on domed colonies. Let me guess, the build time says "never", doesn't it. If it does, then that means that you have zero population on that planet. You need to transfer some pop. over from one of your other worlds. And next time, remember to put population on you colony ships (with the transfer cargo button, an up arrow and a down arrow on the same button). Or use the "colonize" command whilst the colonizer is over a populated planet. Moving an empty colonizer off the planet before hitting the colonize button results in empty colonizers.

Hope that helps!

PDF · #2 April 29th, 2002, 02:27 PM

I bet you colonized "red dot" worlds, having compatible planet type but incompatible atmosphere ...
These ones only have domed colonies, and space is restricted accordingly, but you should still have from 1 (tiny planet) to 15 (huge) spaces for facilities. Else you have a strange bug

Try to colonize "green dots" and large planets to have more room

(I've read that having a gas race can help here, as gas planets are fewer but larger).

Growltigga · #3 April 29th, 2002, 02:30 PM

and in all cases, make sure that your colony ship has a little "yellow person icon" in its status window to show that it is carrying colonists

as dumbluck correctly says, either manually transfer the colonists on board when at a habitable planet or press the 'C' keyboard button to do the same

Baron Munchausen · #4 April 29th, 2002, 07:14 PM

Just FYI, there might be a way to get default population with a colonizer just like SE3. There is a line in the settings.txt that may or may not work.

Automatic Colonization Population := 0

I've never bothered to change it, but maybe this would make all colonies start with the set default population? Then again maybe it does nothing.

[ 29 April 2002: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

Ragnarok · #5 April 29th, 2002, 08:55 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
Just FYI, there might be a way to get default population with a colonizer just like SE3. There is a line in the settings.txt that may or may not work.

Automatic Colonization Population := 0

I've never bothered to change it, but maybe this would make all colonies start with the set default population? Then again maybe it does nothing.

[ 29 April 2002: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

Yes this is correct. The "Automatic Colonization Population := 0" line in the settings.txt file will make it so you don't have to load pop onto a ship. I just tested it for the trial of it. I just put 5 in the place of 0 and I built a colony ship and sent it to a planet without loading pop onto the ship and then colonized the planet, and it had 5M pop on it even though the ship itself had none on it. So if you don't want to bother loading cargo change this setting to however many million people you want on the planet at first. Although this is cheating, if I were to change it for a game I would only put 1 in place of the 0 to make it longer before the planet got a good sized pop on it. But I would still considar it cheating as it takes away some of the realizim from the game.

Atrocities · #6 April 29th, 2002, 09:02 PM

Ah yes, the Newbi Can't Build Colony question yet once again.

We really should post a quick guide to newbie questions on one of our web sites for these new players. They would benefit a lot from it, and it would also give us something to do that would help everyone.

Your question is often asked, and as you can see, answered.

Best of luck with the game, and welcome to our little addiction.

The Scarlet Pimpernell · #7 April 30th, 2002, 01:33 AM

I have tried to build colonies outside my home-system, but they all show the "doomed-colony" symbol, and so I cannot build anything on them.

Can somebody tell me how to build a thriving colony outside my home-system?

Thank you.
S.P.

Mudshark · #8 April 30th, 2002, 01:57 AM

Atrocities, perhaps this is right up my ally. As always you ideas are well founded. work willing, I'll start working on this in the next few days.

dogscoff · #9 May 1st, 2002, 12:09 PM

quote:

We really should post a quick guide to newbie questions on one of our web sites for these new players. They would benefit a lot from it, and it would also give us something to do that would help everyone.

But that would ruin our "faqracing" games=-)

Lord Balzingo · #10 May 2nd, 2002, 12:59 PM

Well, duh! I've only had SEIV for less than a week, but I had fairly quickly figured out that sending a colony ship didn't necessarily mean sending any colonists. But I had stupidly assumed that I had to send a population transport along with the colony ship to establish the base population. As a consequence, all of my colonies started with 300M inhabitants, and as I put them on pretty hospitable worlds, I got great overall population growth. ButI was wondering how those other races managed to colonise without my ever seeing any transports, and why their colonies seemed so small. Duh. It didn't even occur to me to strip out some engines from my colony ship to make storage space!

As it turns out, my tactic (fast colony ships paird with fast population transports) was good for getting large colonies quickly in distant systems, but I wonder if I'd have done so if I'd known!