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[goduranus]

Hmm, I've found something interesting. If you're flying over a star system in hyperspace, and get an intel update, there's a pirate or pather base in the system, cuz they tend to set up hyperwave communicators to every system they move into.

[Baxter]

There's an even easier way to find pirate pather and bases but it's an exploit currently. But on the other hand there's no mechanic to find them otherwise other than manually searching every single system and they can be affecting colonies from very far away meaning it can take hours of mind-numbing searching to find them and they can disable your colony's star/megaport for 100+ days and cause huge issues so:

Spoiler

Pirate/pather bases show up in the planets tab on the intel screen. Select (inhabited) and sort by type, scroll down until stations start showing up and every pirate/pather station that's spawned will be listed.

[close]

[Megas]

The Intel exploit will be removed next release.

[StarGibbon]

There's an even easier way to find pirate pather and bases but it's an exploit currently. But on the other hand there's no mechanic to find them otherwise other than manually searching every single system and they can be affecting colonies from very far away meaning it can take hours of mind-numbing searching to find them and they can disable your colony's star/megaport for 100+ days and cause huge issues so:

And this is a huge problem once the exploit is closed. "If a "nearby" pirate base is threatening your base its fairly simple to find. An LP base threat usually has an arrow to follow to find it. But the dreaded "distant" pirate base threat? There is no practical way to find these things without getting lucky, and the penalties they impose on the colony really add up after a while.

So we either need to get rid of the "Distant" pirate base colony threat, or get an arrow like with the LP bases.

[edit]  Appears we dont even get an arrow with LP bases until they're discovered, so there needs to be some kind of efficient way to deal with these threats other than needle in a haystack hunting and pecking.

[Megas]

As posted in the other topic, bar visits at targeted market can reveal bases of pirates.  No such luck for Pathers.

[Baxter]

Usually the bar will have a spacer drinking something cheap who'll give you the location of the pirate base threatening a colony, but it's not guaranteed. Before I found out about the exploit I tried doing countless pirate base bounty missions for the ingame factions in the hopes that eventually they'd give a bounty for a luddic path base.

Actually, I wonder if the bar event to find luddic path bases is available in the default luddic path systems only or something? Or some other weird eventuality. Either way it'll get changed eventually and I'm pretty sure alex isn't going to close the exploit until a suitable replacement mechanic for finding pather bases is in place. And perhaps some other mechanics to make managing pather cells less of a chore...

[Draba]

...

Agreed overall, with notes:

• Missile spec: Harbinger was mentioned, it's definitely great there(in the "bring a baseball bat to beat up toddlers" way ).
• Defensive systems: Lvl3 is great on hightech, single Apogee with ~0.32 shields and 150+ hard flux regen tanks 5 autopulse big bads for ages. To me it is an obvious choice.
• Damage control: IMO tied with missile spec for worst combat skill
• Helmsmanship: I'm a big fan of front shield conversion and everything gets lvl 2 anyway, +1 is great on gunships with long range.
• Power grid modulation: not the first opinion on lvl2 being good, I'm a bit confused by that.
  To me lvl2 seems mostly fluff and lvl3 is the best bonus by far. Could be good for solo but in a fleet kinda pointless IMO.
• Industry: I think this entire aptitude is unnecessary after you have one good colony with alpha admin.
  Can spam pristine combat ships, get enough cargo/fuel to cross the sector multiple times and in general ignore anything money-related.
  Only things I miss on skipping this are the extra blueprints from salvaging.
• Industrial planning: It's 30% income, not profit. Ridiculously good but can be gotten from admins.

[Megas]

Power Grid Modulation 2 is great because your ship vents significantly faster.  Resistant Flux Conduits alone (along with high vents) is required to not spend ages to vent, but it is not always fast enough.  With the 2 perk too, you can vent quickly.  Vent spam with flux hogs becomes a useful option.

REDACTED-infested systems have a high chance of terran-grade planets with good resources, and also research stations and other goodies, from what I've seen.

This has not been the case for me.  Their systems seem just are random as other similar stars.  I have seen few arid planets that are worth colonizing, but nothing that screams primary colony more than others in undefended systems.

[Draba]

Power Grid Modulation 2 is great because your ship vents significantly faster.  Resistant Flux Conduits alone (along with high vents) is required to not spend ages to vent, but it is not always fast enough.  With the 2 perk too, you can vent quickly.  Vent spam with flux hogs becomes a useful option.

Wait, you voluntarily use resistant flux conduits? RFD/reinforced bulkheads just seem like a waste of OP to me when used in fleets.
What ships are you usually flying/what fleet composition and agains what enemies? Gotta give that a spin.

[Megas]

If you rely on flux hogs like Heavy Blaster, Mjolnir, Gauss, or just combined flux load of too many guns... or if you simply take a lot of hard flux from enemy fire due to range disadvantage, being able to vent all flux away in a second or two is very nice, at least for my flagship.

Since 0.8, the only way to get EMP resistance is Resistant Flux Conduits.  Before 0.8, stronger skills combined with RFC could mostly immunize ships from EMP.  Now, the only way to get EMP resistance is that hullmod, and it really helps if your ship cannot defend against EMP very well.

EMP Resistance plus faster venting makes that hullmod a no-brainer for me, provided my ship has near max vents and can afford it.  Not every ship can fit it in.

As for Reinforced Bulkheads, most of my ships are clunkers and whatever I can buy or recover until very late after I effectively won the game.  By the time I can get the blueprints I want and a colony that can produce them, I am already strong enough to destroy anything or raid the core worlds as much as I want.

Before 0.9, any time I lost a ship, I reloaded because restoration is expensive if I recovered the ship.  Also, in 0.8, good weapons were rarer than ships, and it was much faster for me to reload and try again instead of spending hours grinding for more light needlers or other rare weapon.  With Reinforced Bulkheads or other guaranteed ship recovery today, I rarely reload the game.  I can lose most of my fleet, but as long as I win the battle and recover my ships, I do not care too much and proceed with the game.

[Xan]

Okay, some belated thoughts on this part as im reading through it.

2.  Build your bank account to 500 million credits minimum.  You need money to pay for the defensive buildings AND the cost to avert the first few attacks and "inspections".

[...]

4.  Search and find a nice colony (like you did).  Consider first colony your primary colony:  pick a great one:  perhaps 100% hazard or lower, nice ruins plus any extras.

You want maximum population incentive, max defensive buildings, tech mining, farm, spaceport+, waystation.  Gonna be a ton of up-front spending.  On farming:  i'm no economic expert but I think that every colony should be able to feed itself

5.  When time to colonize:  Prepare to ship 1000 colonists AND still be able to field a minimum crew on all ships (perhaps a transport).  Be aware the crew costs money so lugging around +1000 crew isn't sustainable.

2. 500 million? You mean 500 thousand? Honestly that's already kinda overdoing it a little unless you wanna completely frontload construction, which isnt going to necessarily going to do you any good until you can reliably establish your colony to have a solid stability and market value, and the means to defend them.

I started just having a mining/refining world that made money, while I went and got more money. Immediately throwing yourself into the construction race before you even have a fleet presence in a system just means you constantly get harassed by major fleets that blow up your station and lower your stability, getting you in the red.
(in my experience heavy idustry has been the reason for disruption fleets 90% of the time)

I'd argue you'd wanna colonise multiple planets per system and build patrol HQ's to generally have friendly npc's keeping invasions busy before going full ham into making one planet a powerhouse.

4. Don't worry about searching for the perfect 100% hazard colony, as long as it has something positive, a 150% barren world will do just fine, especially if its close to the core like duzahk. The most important things to colonies are single handedly stability and acessibility, the increase in upkeep becomes irrelevant very fast once it gets rolling.

5. This is pretty good advice, in terms of a good fleet size to have when you start colonizing.

[Megas]

Frontloading construction can be handy if colony is out in the fringe and you do not want to go back to core unless absolutely necessary.  I had one million credits and did a building spree on three colonies, and almost ran out.  Due to the drain of crew and resources, I needed to wait around until my colonies were up and produce crew and commodities to replenish my ships.

I started just having a mining/refining world that made money, while I went and got more money. Immediately throwing yourself into the construction race before you even have a fleet presence in a system just means you constantly get harassed by major fleets that blow up your station and lower your stability, getting you in the red.

This is why I wait until I get an endgame fleet that can kill any single fleet that threatens the colony until it gets up off the ground.  It takes very little to provoke major factions, and even if you do not, you can still get large pirate armadas that want to raid your world.  Also, if you want your own source of supplies and ships, you will deal with Pathers almost as soon as you build your Heavy Industry, and I do not want to hunt for Pathers until I have an endgame fleet of my own to survive their bloated war fleets (and battlestation).

[Xan]

To be fair, pathers are essentially no threat in my experience, at least not to the same extent as major fleets.

I don't know if the severity of faction interference scales with level or something, but (against my own advice) I made heavy industry pretty early on my latest (blind) playthrough, and I dont recall interference really starting for a while. I was still happily hauling goods and fullfilling trading requests, building up my colony bit by bit for a while before my first invasions. And at that point I more or less was in a position to kind of ignore them most of the time.
I made light industry last, as I had no organics (at the time I thought that would be an issue, supply wise), and I wasnt aware of the beauty that is free port and drug production, so maybe that had something to do with it.

Long story short, if you want effortless as possible colony construction, frontloading works totally fine (costs you a fair chuk of money though, as megas mentioned, definitely more than 500k), but you likely wanna build up multiple patrol HQ's in system to populate the system with friendlies before the invasions start. Also the 90 or so days until everything is online you lose a good chunk of money per month, as youre only paying upkeep but not yet gaining any money.

[Megas]

To be fair, pathers are essentially no threat in my experience, at least not to the same extent as major fleets.

The thing about Pathers is you cannot ignore them because they will ignore your defenses and disrupt an industry, along with -1 stability just for existing, if you do not destroy their base once a year.  This is part of the reason why people scream it is too hard to find them without Intel exploit.  With major factions, you can eventually ignore them altogether after your colonies are powerful enough.  One may not be enough, but two with built-up militaries in the same system can take care of themselves.

Even pirates can be more annoying than major factions because they can reduce stability and accessibility just by existing until you destroy their base, much like Pathers, although you can at least visit the bar of your own colony to find base without Intel exploit.

[StarGibbon]

I agree with Megas. Past a certain point, your colonies with proper defenses will mostly take care of enemy fleets by themselves, but LP bypasses all this, and ruins your economy directly.  You can take a massive financial hit from a disrupted starbase on a key world. LP are far and away the most annoying of all colony pests.