Colony

To expand your empire, reach beyond your homeworld, and increase production of resources you need to colonize other planets.

How To
A planet is colonized using a Colony Ship. You can have only 8 colonies plus your homeplanet in the old universes. However, in the redesign universes, the number of colonies possible is equal to (Level of Astrophysics Technology) / 2 rounded up.

Colony sizes
Please refer to Colonization for old universes and Colonizing in Redesign Universes for redesign ones.

Farm colony
The principle is very simple: a farm colony is equipped with high level mines and is built solely for the purpose of generating resources. The planet requires virtually no defense and very little storage capacity, because the produced resources are either immediately put into new levels of mines or later daily collected and shipped to another planet.

Resource Base
The resource base should be a big colony equipped with strong defenses and high level tanks, in addition to the mines. All the resources from the farms get transported here. Therefore, a resource base is the most popular target for raiders and has to be defended well. The farms and the resource base should be located somewhat close to each other, to shorten transport time and fuel cost.

Fleet hub
A fleet hub usually has a high level shipyard, to put the loot into more ships. It also often has a moon with a Jump Gate. If it is the only planet by a player in a particular galaxy, it should be located in the center of the galaxy, to minimize fuel cost and increase the amount of systems in range of buildings like the phalanx sensor or IPMs.

Graviton colony
This type of colony is made only for the purpose of conducting the Graviton technology research. Thus, it has a research lab level 12 or more and a large amount of solar satellites. They are often abandoned after the research is complete, so they have no mines. A graviton colony is usually located on position 1 of an empty region of a galaxy, so no one notices it. Putting the colony in position 1, rather than 4 or 5 saves up to several million resources, because one has to build fewer solar satellites.

Deuterium colony
Although rare, Deuterium colonies are usually a slot 15 planet (due to the production bonus), with a high level deuterium synthesizer and a solar plant. They may also have high level deuterium tanks, however if mass amounts of deuterium are produced quickly the deuterium could be transported often; saving fields on smaller planets. Deuterium tanks can be quite helpful, boosting the amount of harvested rare deuterium. Usually not many defenses are needed except for basics, these are just used for fending off small attacks as the deuterium is regularly transported to another planet where it is needed. One other use for a Deuterium colony is trading. For example; if you have 10,000 Deuterium then you could trade it for a larger amount of metal or crystal.