My experience with the colony has been great so far, but it comes with some problems.
The current save of mine has 5 colonies, the capital at 7 stability pumps 320k per month. The moon has 300k at stability 6 and a gas giant in the same system with -50k. To get this I have spent millions on production and incentives with maxed out relative skills. It was a blast throughout the entire process and I loved the ability to have a giant stockpile of resources for your own personal use (Tariff-free). There are problems though, but once fixed, it will make the process even more enjoyable.
Here are the problems I've had:
1) I have three colonies in the same system, all being bigger then 5 so they attract A LOT of expeditions. The result is a litter of massive battles (Imagine 4 big blobs of one faction, 3 of another and 5 of your own with your spaceport, it was overkill). With my fleet of several capital ships, I tried one and the largest battle took 40 minutes and many engagements to complete, I spent almost all of my CR and concluded by LEAVING the battle without the salvage. Why? The enemy fleet of logistic ships was so large they had their own separate fight. They would retreat every time, spending CR on both sides, I had to leave or risk spending all my CR.
2) The process of the beginning of a colony and making a full-fledged sector market leader has too few steps in the process, it is as simple as placing the right things based on the colonized planet (note tiles like farming/mining are a one-step process) and volla, you just wait for it to grow.
3) I would love to customize my stations, but as of current, I haven't found the option to do so yet. This is a problem b/c the High-tech variant is still using mining lasers as their main armament based on what I had in the early days.
Here are some solutions that may help with the above problems:
-Have each of the tiles include more steps and have more unique tiles. The current version automatically improves production as the colony enlargens, but this makes it lackluster form a players perspective. If players were to have control over the farms and mining like upgrading from a spaceport to a megaport, it shows more clear signs of progression. What's even better, include unique upgrades to these tiles if certain conditions are met, like specialized mining facilities.
-As an extension of the step above, make planet size, and population size the major determinators of how much and how specialized the tiles the colony can build (Or planet size a contributing stat for how fast the colony grows). This would in effect create more meaningful choices because colonies are limited to what they can specialize with. The current build lets size 3 colonies on tiny moons to have the capability to match that of a habitable planet with size 7 structure wise, so with the appropriate money, the player only needs to spam all structures in one go and leave for two months to finish all upgrades.
-Stability 10 planets should not have so much expeditions coming every month, its a battlefield with salvageable ships floating everywhere, like really, everywhere, not to mention the debris ring the game has artificially made.
-QoL improvements:
-Indicators for upgradeable tiles
-Allow installation of cores and special items on any planet when the item is within a colonies storage
It's getting long so I'll be making a new topic for this specifically
I agree with the colony issues, as it stands it is too easy to grow too fast and become a zit for another faction.
Maybe tie the output of facilities to the population? with some requiring some sort of minimum pop size?
Free ports should allow some fast growth but they don't seem to have sufficient side effects that I can see, the accessibility uptick lets us print money... perhaps the stability effects should be more pronounced the bigger the colony gets?
Maybe increase the demands for luxuries and the like once populations hit a certain number? (4-5?) as, outside drugs, there doesn't seem to be much need for light industry (perhaps some health related product?)
I think expeditions should be rarer, or at least less frequent than they are now, they should be meaningful, I think rather than "OH, look the Diktat fleet is here, it must be Tuesday, then" that ends up becoming
A suggestion here, maybe add in an education stats for colonies, that can tie in to production of the more precious resources (fuel, hulls?) and perhaps the more manpower intensive (farming? mining?), so the more educated colonies can produce more or more efficiently, freeport would cap the max education (since it is an educational average, and the freeport would make education less of a priority, and with drugs legal....) while one extra variable is annoying, fast growth (specially thru freeport) should bring in more fortune seekers and low education colonists, so it could serve as some sort of counterweight for dropping tons of credits into encouragements (basically: grow too fast, education goes down and that should have cascading effects that would make the colony less profitable, ton for ton, than before)
That said, great game thus far, hope we can get some balance soonish
