Moron system colony ships

[gloob]

System colony ships still seem to be strangely attracked to RED2 planets. In my home system I had 7 planets: my home, 3 RED2 and 3 someway green. These RED2s are absolutely awkward with extreme grav, very bad penalties etc so if one of them were the last uncolonized planet in the universe you still would wait for an enemy to settle and then blast it to smitherines.

Now no matter how many system colonies I produce, eighter 1 pod or 2 pods, they keep being sent to the REDs until the very last of them is colonized.

Grumble.

[Doomed]

Reduced chance of building a system colony ship

Quote from QSI about the final version of the beta patch Here

not exactly what you wanted, but it may help sooth your grumbles.

Can't say when this patch will be released though.

[ravagon]

Try turning off the auto-colonise option in your empire window - at least when you know you're about to get a ship off the production line.
Then you can specify the planet you wish to colonise and reactivate the automate option again afterwards.

[CharlesBHoff]

I alway play with the auto colonzation off and use the click system where on the planet you can click in the force box to sent than colony ship.

[Grumbold]

I usually turn on auto colonise after I have 25+ planets and the sort of techs that make red ones at least marginally useful. You certainly don't want them being colonised when your food and mineral income is marginal.

[Vince278]

I have never used auto-colonize. The AI hasn't convinced me its smarter than me yet. It may do an okay job picking some planets but it has no way to take into account the current strategic situation when choosing (or not choosing) where to go.

[Grumbold]

No, thjats true, but its a lot easier to let the AI pick a planet ot two to colonise every turn than to do it all yourself. The nice thing about Moo is that it is at least vaguely capable of doing it if you choose to delegate the responsibility.

[Vince278]

I tend to delegate more in the end-game.

[The diplomat]

If I am not mistaken, you can tell the AI where to colonize, by selecting a planet and pressing the "send colony" button.

I usually play with auto-colonize on. But also, each time a scout finds a new system, I select the planets I want to to colonize and mark them with the "send colony" button. That way, each time I produce a colony ship, the AI will automatically send them to planets I like.

[gunnergoz]

Diplomat-
The problem is, when you earmark a planet with "send colony" the dumb AI will send ship after ship in that direction, all but the first will end up stalled at an already colonized planet.
What I do is to turn off the "colonize planet" button for that planet, once the AI has notified me that a ship is being sent there in the news readout. The AI orders to the ship will have it colonize the originally ordered planet, whether or not the planet has the colonize flag on or off once the ship arrives. This does stop the AI from sending ship after ship for no reason to the same planet.
For some reason, the AI is much more intelligent about Outpost ships, and seldom in my experience does it send more than one consecutive outpost ship to the same selected planet...in fact, it will send excess outposts to the reserve fleet where they will await another designated "send outpost" planet to be designated by the player.

[Vince278]

Originally posted by The diplomat
If I am not mistaken, you can tell the AI where to colonize, by selecting a planet and pressing the "send colony" button.

I never use the button because of the complications.

[Algernon Pondlife]

gloob's question was about system colony ships, not interstellar ones. The problem is entirely different because the AI keeps putting system colony ships into the build queue when you are not looking even when there are no attractive colonies in the system in question. The QSI response at the moment seems to be to just reduce the frequency. I think it needs a ploicy control of some kind either to tell it no "system colonies please" or no system colonies unless the available planets are at least [green/yellow2] or whatever. Once you have good "terraforming" capabilities you could switch it off again and you could always override in a good case.

As for interstellar colony ships, I find the AI often auto-directs more than one to the same flagged planet even when other planets have been flagged. This is a small nuisance at first but once you have more than one possible starting point it can be very bad as the ship will often be launched at the wrong place and take too long to get to its amended destination.

edit: sorry hadn't read gunnergoz' message properly. I'll try that trick. Perhaps we should be more trusting

[Admiral]

I find it easier to just turn off planetary economy AIs, at least in the early game. The AI seems to never manage my empire correctly, particularly with distribution of money. In the early and middle game, its even not so tedious. Admittedly, by the time one has a rather large empire, it is infeasible, but by then, one should have enough of a cushion that a little AI stupidity can't really hurt.

[Daz]

Speaking of colony ships.... does anyone know if the AI is intelligent enough to send the right kind of race to colonize worlds on auto-colonize?

If not, this feature is useless...

[Vince278]

Good question. I haven't seen it do that but then I rarely auto-colonize anyway.