Are early colonies a good investment? Let's see. Pick a low-hazard world with farming and mining opportunities. These are the expenses you will want to make:
- ~100k for crew, supplies and other materials to colonize and build a comm relay
- ~100k to buy ships to transport the above (pair of nebula's and a freighter)
- 75k to build Farming
- 100k to build Mining
- 100k to build Waystation, so you can resupply at the colony.
- 250k to build an Orbital station, the most effective defense.
- 150k to build Ground Defenses, for the stability bonus.
- 300k for Patrol HQ, so you spawn some ships to deal with straggler pirate fleets, etc.
- 5k/month for an Administrator with Industrial Planning. Pays for itself so it's a no-brainer.
- 5-10k/month for Hazard Pay to grow to size 4.
Total: roughly 1.3 million credits all told.
This is a textbook example of the points I was raising on what
not to do when your colony's still small. If this is how someone plays, power to them, but people should treat colony income/expenses the same way as they do flux dissipation. Building a colony is not dissimilar to fitting a ship and smaller colonies will have a hard time supporting a number of costs that, in my opinion, aren't quite necessary for their size.
Defense-wise, a size 3 colony can get by perfectly fine with just ground defenses
or a station, especially if it's the first colony. They both protect against raids and improve stability and either one is really all you need for the scale of raids the colony will be having in the early game. Doubling up on the defenses at this point is just paying for the sake of peace of mind. Also, at this stage, players won't have
anything to bump their fleet size or ship quality, so a Patrol HQ is about useless. Especially if its early game and they don't even have blueprints. An early game patrol HQ is just burning money for the sake it. Eventually, as the colony grows and the industries increase in number and resources produce, players will have a need to bump their defenses, but it's not necessary to start with.
Regarding a way-station, if it's still in the early game and relatively strapped for cash, especially if the player doesn't plan on baby-sitting their first colony, they won't be getting any benefit off it. At this point in the game, they should be playing the markets for the highest returns and this also applies to where and how they get they supplies, fuel and crew from. Just like how you buy from excess markets to sell to deficit markets, at this phase where money is a luxury you should also be getting your resources in the same way, if not from space battles.
I see this, not as an example of colonies taking a long time to be profitable, but more of an example of poor planning. Maybe it's an issue of mindset. Players build their ships strategically to get the most advantage of each hull size within the limitations of OP and flux dissipation and should build colonies with the same mindset. Is this investment and expenditure really justified for a colony of this size? What do I want from my colony? Do I need a waystation if I don't plan on visiting it much? Am I in a hurry for it to grow, to justify the expense of the hazard pay? People can't just throw structures and industries onto a colony any more than they can add weapons and hullmods onto their ships haphazardly and expect it to work.
