I don't have time to answer all posts today, but I will come back later.
Colony upgrades should be treated like s-mods for ships - hard limit. No more than two or three or whatever per colony (and let player reassign improvements like commander skills). None of this dangle the reward in front of the player that is theoretically possible but extremely hard or tedious to obtain. There was a reason character level was changed from soft level to hard level.
I like this idea.
It clearly better than mine.
If you're going this route, why not just remove the story point use instead of replacing it with credits and another stage of building, and just increase the time for things to build and costs associated? Even more staged building than what we have is not that interesting to me. If you're expected to do it anyways (because credits become effectively unlimited in the late colony game), just remove the extra clicking rather than making me do more busy work. In this proposed system, since the expectation is you upgrade everything to the max level with credits, the lower stage profits would be reduced, so the final expected state is the same as now (which is colonies with 1 or maybe 2 story point upgrades).
They should not be dropped because the allow the adaption to local conditions.
e.g. a weak deposit, too few planets for patrols, similar things.
