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[Jabroni]

I feel like every game I play the moment i colonize the fun ends. It's constant defending my colonies, even if I'm present at every raid and build every defensive building I still get debuffs from pirate activity and my colonies lack resources lowering my stability and income, causing me to dump money into them and not being able to profit from the trade, becuase my fleet has to defend the settlements. Is there anything that can be done to avoid it or colonies are just not worth putting time into?

[Hiruma Kai]

The game can be quite effectively played without colonies.  A commission at high level brings in a reasonable amount of passive income each month.

Colonies take a lot of initial credits (I generally don't get into them without about 1 million credits in the bank), as well as dealing with issues early on, but once fully operational they just print giant piles of credits rendering most credit costs meaningless.  They also allow you to build ships and weapons based off your blueprints known, which may or may not be useful to you.  Stability and defensive fleets can generally be increased sufficiently you can ignore most issues and attacks, assuming you've got multiple size 5 or 6 colonies up in a single system with Military HQ industries.  If you don't mind being at war with the Hegemony, you can use AI cores to your hearts content and not bother defending a set of fully upgraded colonies and simply ignoring inspection fleets with orders to your colonies to blow them up.

Ideally, you should need to only sweep a Pather base once per in game year (assuming you wait until all your colonies are in sync with active Pather cells).  Pirates can be a bit more annoying, as those seem to pop up more often.  Finishing the current story line and then placing your colonies in a gate system can help with travel times and protecting them.

Anyways, about the only point to colonies is a large late game passive credit stream and building stuff from your blueprints.  Oh, and a convenient fuel depot to buy fuel for late game capital fleets.  If you don't need any of that (buying your fuel at Sindaria or Nachiketa, have your fleet together already, your bank account is already growing each month without needing more passive income), then yeah, you can skip the colonization portion of the game.

[BCS]

They print money.

You certainly don't need to defend colonies all the time, I smell mods.

[prav]

All those raids, expeditions, etc? Not actually that damaging. Feel free to just ignore them.

[ANGRYABOUTELVES]

I feel like every game I play the moment i colonize the fun ends. It's constant defending my colonies, even if I'm present at every raid and build every defensive building I still get debuffs from pirate activity and my colonies lack resources lowering my stability and income, causing me to dump money into them and not being able to profit from the trade, becuase my fleet has to defend the settlements. Is there anything that can be done to avoid it or colonies are just not worth putting time into?

This is caused by poor system selection. You want all your colonies in a single system with at least 4 planets that can fill as much of its own demand as possible to reduce upkeep as much as possible, and support multiple military bases. Or alternatively a single military base on an extremely hot planet with a Cryoarithmic engine. Incoming raids and expeditions can't deal with multiple military bases in the same system. The pirate activity debuff is ignorable for quite a while, and luddic path activity should only require killing 1 station every year; so about 2 stations per year combined, as long as you only have a single system to worry about. Having multiple systems means a less concentrated military presence so raids and expeditions are way more likely to require your presence, multiple areas of pirate activity, and potentially luddics being supplied from multiple separate bases, massively increasing the amount of busywork you need to do. You need to emulate the Sindrian Dictat, not the Hegemony.

[Amoebka]

You actually need to emulate independents. No investment in defenses at all, and if raids happen, let them plunder.

Military industries and structures cost much more than you lose to raids. Unless you want to play the same savefile for 3 IRL months, don't even bother. The "infinite credit printing machine" takes way too long to pay for the initial investment.

[Sahqovum]

This is something I've been wondering too. They seem important enough Alex not only added them but even gave them special loot you can acquire. But at the same time they don't really add more combat than anything else (I'll admit since they came out I've never had an issue with defending them, I suppose I just might not play as long as others as I only make it 8 years tops before I'm done) and with the addition of arms dealers even the BP aspect isn't that big of a deal now.

[Serenitis]

Military industries and structures cost much more than you lose to raids.

This is what trips people up.
New colonies can be profitable just by existing from population taxes, even more so if they have access to farming or mining exports.
But all of that income can be wiped out several times over by just building random stuff all over the colony and racking up maintenance costs.
And the more hazardous the world the quicker this compounds, so the fewer things you can build and stay in the black.

Running colonies isn't just about knowing what to build, but also when to build.
Your first colony wants to be as minimalist as possible starting out - a mine or farm, plus a level 1 station. That's it. Nothing more.
Avoid the temptation to build everything immediately.
Patrol HQ is the big maint. hog that usually causes problems early on. (Patrol has a maint value of 8 vs a station that has a value of 3.)
You definitely do need to build a HQ eventually, but you don't need it immediately. Wait until you have a decent income to cover the cost.

It doesn't really matter if your colony gets raided though, it's only a temporary stability loss that should be easily absorbed.

[Supereor]

I find colonies are extremely important for my playstyle of "only use fleets that can be completely replaced with ships built from blueprints".  I also don't quite like commissions because of how many systems instantly become dangerous when you take one(at least, in Nexerelin).

[Vind]

I only create colony to sustain officers huge payments. Unless this will be somehow changed game will be focused on money to sustain maximum amount of officers so you can deploy more ships. Rare officers is a no win situation - you cant fire them as they are unique so it is constant money drain.

[hugeknight]

because they print money, you just gotta do it right, dont hurry

[Ryan390]

The short answer to the OP would be: 'Yes'

It's a pretty core feature of the game and a lot of fun.

[Thaago]

Military industries and structures cost much more than you lose to raids.

This is what trips people up.
New colonies can be profitable just by existing from population taxes, even more so if they have access to farming or mining exports.
But all of that income can be wiped out several times over by just building random stuff all over the colony and racking up maintenance costs.
And the more hazardous the world the quicker this compounds, so the fewer things you can build and stay in the black.

Running colonies isn't just about knowing what to build, but also when to build.
Your first colony wants to be as minimalist as possible starting out - a mine or farm, plus a level 1 station. That's it. Nothing more.
Avoid the temptation to build everything immediately.
Patrol HQ is the big maint. hog that usually causes problems early on. (Patrol has a maint value of 8 vs a station that has a value of 3.)
You definitely do need to build a HQ eventually, but you don't need it immediately. Wait until you have a decent income to cover the cost.

It doesn't really matter if your colony gets raided though, it's only a temporary stability loss that should be easily absorbed.

I'll add Waystation to the 'minimal colony' list, so that the colony is guaranteed to have the fuel and supplies to keep me going if I'm in the neighborhood. But Waystation helps to pay for itself because it raises accessibility and so the amount of money other industries make.

[Alavaria]

The old pop-up Waystation gas pump is a classic. It's definitely good to remember that actually it's ok for the less critical ones to occasionally take a hit, particularly if your super powerhouse of industry is a foundation that's bedrock solid and mulches people.

Also, the population-based component sure is a great basis for your economy when everyone gets angry at you for "reasons" and mass-sanction your faction.

[Thaago]

There is also the old "Hegemony is my protector" colonization trick, where you take a Hegemony commission right after the tutorial (which itself is a good chunk of change) then check the maps to see if there any decent rocks to colonize in their systems and rush for a colony. The Hegemony usually does a decent job stopping pirates for you.