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[FabianClasen]

I really love the new colony development thing. And i have a question about it.

From nearly the very start after founding my first colony, maybe one or two months after starting to become provitable, three major factions, who actually are neutral or friendly to me, started targeting my colony with a barage of Expeditionary Forces. Those are fleets attacking anything in my colonies system and disabling one of the buildings there. (In my case making the colony highly unprofitable in the process.)

When reading the event text i noticed there are reasons given, why they send the expeditions. In my case it was selling of Illegal goods and making my port a free port.

1) So now i wonder if i can switch off selling of illegal goods somewhere? Or is it just the free port automatically selling them?

2) How do you guys deal with it? Do you bribe them, do you fight them every time, or just dont use the free port option? The defence fleets seem not really up to the defending job on their own.

3) Does the diplomatic status prevent expeditions at higher levels of friendliness?

[Megas]

Not build colony until you get an endgame fleet.  Get plenty of combat related skills early, that is, hold off on exploration and colony skills until later in the game.

Building colony too early is a newbie trap, one that almost costed me the game.

[Grievous69]

Well it's a newbie trap if you don't invest in any defenses. I was impatient so I built a colony on a 175% hazard planet as soon as I got 1000 crew with 200k credits on the side. My fleet was just 2 destroyers and 3 frigates then with no colony skills whatsoever. It needed babysitting in the beginning but once you get decent fleets orbiting the planet and a battlestation it's smooth sailing from there. Also having a comission greatly helps with colonies or otherwise I'd be in debt and probably never recover.

[Thaago]

My experience is that you should have a good set of blueprints including a capital before founding a serious colony, but your own fleet doesn't need to be large. A solid player cruiser + escorts will stave off anything pirates or early expeditions can throw at you and as soon as your manufacturing kicks in you can make more.

As others have said, don't neglect defenses. A battlestation, fleet headquarters, and ground defenses should be priority builds on a new colony, followed shortly by heavy industry to improve ship quality. I found that once I had two colonies with military upgrades (and full quality ships due to exploration goody) in the same system, I was set: nothing the AI had could dent the fleets and I was free to fly around exploring.

[Megas]

Ground defenses mean jack if my fleet is too weak to destroy a massive endgame fleet or more during midgame, especially when adding ground defenses will tip my expenses into the red and my colony and character effectively die from debt.

At the time, I did not know how significant various colony stats were, let alone finer points of colony management, and made uninformed choices.  As my colony grew, it sucked more and more profit and reached the point were invasions were unavoidable.  I had to invest in colony skills at the spot to save my character from going into debt.  Then, got more combat skills when my midgame fleet was too weak to defeat a large late midgame fleet.  At that point, early game bounties and the like mostly vanished.

Is it expected for newcomers to forum-dive for relatively obscure information before knowing the correct way to play without committing an unwinnable game mistake?

[Igncom1]

For this game in eternal development? Kinda.

But that's the fun in playing early content like this, you get saturation nuked from time to time.

[Thaago]

The station is for beating the fleets: the defenses are for making it so that small fleets can't do anything. Even a small player fleet + a battlestation easily wins against a multiple capital ship enemy. Add in a friendly patrol with cruisers or at the very least condor spam and you really should be able to beat the enemy invasion fleets even if you can't take large bounties by yourself.

I find your comments on skills confusing. You are basically saying "I can make lots of mistakes when making a colony and then fix them by taking the skill." Thats a good thing. A new player can do exactly what you did and make a first-guess colony and come out of it with a healthy profit. Then, when they know what to do, they can make a better one/correct the first one.

I do agree that having a heavily bombed out colony can kill a game, but I only think that is the case because we cannot abandon colonies larger than size 3. If we could just abandon the -100k/month bombed out wreck then the loss would just be a temporary setback.

To answer the questions in the OP which I should have before....

1) You have to turn off free port to stop selling illegal goods. If you do so, get rid of your "light industry" as its really only profitable as a drugs factory.

2) I turned off my free port briefly when I was ramping up by station to level 2. At one point I also removed by synchrotron core to give me a break on fuel production invasions. However once I had my defenses up I just let them come and wiped them out.

3) I don't think so, but you can use reputation to stop invasion fleets (a few times before you are out). I would love for there to be some actual diplomacy options in turns of getting the ***** to stop invading.

[Megas]

@ Thaago:  At the time, I was sort of living from paycheck to paycheck.  I could not afford a battlestation, and by the time I find about invasion fleets, it is too late to build battlestation.  I think they take 60 days to build, and invasion fleets arrive in about 40 to 50 days (my first colony was near the core worlds).  I had about 200K credits to spend, but I can easily burn that up resupplying and refueling my midgame fleet.  Also, do you need blueprints to arm battlestations properly?  At the time, my blueprint options were very limited.

It was only after I took max colony skills and repelled my first two invasion fleets that things began to snowball in my favor.  It took a long time before I got a third invasion fleet, and by then, I was well prepared to tear them up.

As for colony growth freeze, I discovered to just remove spaceport from time to time, then rebuild it after population falls low enough.  It is too late if you let it hit size 4, unless negative growth can downgrade colony size.

[Serenitis]

invasion fleets arrive in about 40 to 50 days

Depends on distance I belive.
I built my second attempt at a colony on the 'red' planet, which is right in a far corner of the sector map, and I'm getting 90-120 days before expedition fleets arrive. And some of them don't even make it at all.

Colonies are definitely a trap. But they are one that's easily avoided once you know it's there, and rush to building that station as fast as you can.

[Megas]

Colonies are definitely a trap. But they are one that's easily avoided once you know it's there, and rush to building that station as fast as you can.

That is the thing.  You do not know "it's there" if it is your first playthrough and there are no other sources of information to look up, like when 0.9a was first released.

I will not make the same mistakes next game like I did in my first game (which I am still playing).

[Goumindong]

I really love the new colony development thing. And i have a question about it.

From nearly the very start after founding my first colony, maybe one or two months after starting to become provitable, three major factions, who actually are neutral or friendly to me, started targeting my colony with a barage of Expeditionary Forces. Those are fleets attacking anything in my colonies system and disabling one of the buildings there. (In my case making the colony highly unprofitable in the process.)

When reading the event text i noticed there are reasons given, why they send the expeditions. In my case it was selling of Illegal goods and making my port a free port.

1) So now i wonder if i can switch off selling of illegal goods somewhere? Or is it just the free port automatically selling them?

2) How do you guys deal with it? Do you bribe them, do you fight them every time, or just dont use the free port option? The defence fleets seem not really up to the defending job on their own.

3) Does the diplomatic status prevent expeditions at higher levels of friendliness?

1)it is indeed the free port

2) depends on the situation. If I can’t make it back to the colony I usually bribe them. But I also try to structure the colony so it gets less visibility. I keep access low so that exports are limited. I only build industry when I am OK with expeditions. I am now size 5 and get 1-2 expeditions per year, which is not really a big deal.

3) maybe, not sure. I am working on finding this out at the moment. As far as I can tell neutrality with pirates keeps them from raiding my colonies. Neutrality with Luddic Path does not seem to dissolve terrorist cells I do know (but maybe it prevents them from forming or acting?)

[Megas]

So far, no Free Port and no cores means no invasions from Luddic Church and Hegemony.  Still get invasions from the remaining major factions, but they pale to the frustration of finding Pather bases.  I even tried the exploits of viewing system map of all of my explored systems, but found nothing.  Now, I need to visit various unexplored systems and hope the pathers do not blow up an industry or I get yet another invasion alert from a major faction to peel me away from pather hunting.

[Vind]

So im using cores on all buildings except 2 low-cost ones and so far only 4 hegemony inspections arrived for 100 200 300 and 400k progressively. This is a steal as cores alone save me 348.7k per month in maintenance not to mention alpha cores with bonuses. Luddites never visited for some reason - possible their rust buckets cant find their way through storms.

[TaLaR]

@Megas
Planets listing in intel shows "hidden" pather/pirate bases.

[Hiruma Kai]

My experience is that you should have a good set of blueprints including a capital before founding a serious colony, but your own fleet doesn't need to be large. A solid player cruiser + escorts will stave off anything pirates or early expeditions can throw at you and as soon as your manufacturing kicks in you can make more.

I don't think the blueprints you have on hand matter.  Certainly not for autoresolve.  I also would not wait until you have a capital blueprint, as that might not happen until you've explored half the sector, since its quite random.  On my current iron man play through, I founded a colony on a 75% hazard world (which oddly enough gave me my first blueprint set, the High tech one, when exploring its scattered ruins).  It got up and running fast enough that after the two invasion fleets, the defense fleets were bigger than the attackers and I could ignore it there after.  I've had great luck with synchrotrons and pristine nanoforges, but blueprints hate me this run.

My defense fleets are literally Apogees (high intensity laser or autopulse flavors), Shrikes, Condors, and Wolves.  My personal fleet is both warfleet and exploration fleet, because, I don't have a choice in the matter.  Its iron man and sometimes you take losses.  It is funny running surveys on gas giants for 5 supply though, nor needing tankers or cargo ships.