06-05-2003 06:09									#1
	Colonisation: What am I doing wrong? Increase Your PM Length

The first time something strange happened I was trying to colonise a second planet in a system with system colony ships. They just refused to build it. Eventually I had 5 of the things waiting in orbit (it was a green2 world btw) and 3 colony starships enroute. Still nothing.
In the end, after much fiddling around I scrapped the 5 system ships, turned off the colonise flag on the planet, sent the starships to an adjacent system and then back again and it worked. All 3 starships built a size 3 colony.

Second time was another green2 world a few (4?) lanes outside my core systems. The system contained a world belonging to an allied race and another with whom I had a NA treaty. Neither had any ships anywhere near.
After I turned on the colonise flag my colony management geniuses (geniuii?) sent a force of 6(!) ships. Next turn another 3 had set out too. About 15 turns later I had 16 ships just sitting there waiting for who knows what? Nothing. Turned off all flags, retasked a single ship - nothing. Turned it off and then reactivated the planets colonise flag - next turn all 16 ships were trying to colonise again. I gave up and sent them all back to the pool.

Third time I'd just taken an enemy system (accidentally depopulating a green1 world - who knew those missiles weren't population-friendly? ) and tried to re-colonise. Again nothing. Starship after starship was sent in and all of them just sat there doing nothing. I gave up watching and just left it alone.
A few turns ago I got the "planet colonised" message in my sitrep and went to the system to find all of my colony ships gone and a size 19 colony in place.
(using my astounding powers of deduction I calculate that I ended up using about ... oh shall we say 19 colony ships? ).
Not only that but there was some sort of rollover bug in the build-time for the obligatory industry dea. Time to completion something in excess of 2 billion turns [Edit: Actually 2^31-1 if that helps any]. An awfully lazy lot my people.
That didn't change the next turn so I scrapped it and started a new one which seemed to work fine.

What am I doing wrong?
Am I ravagon ... heir to the throne of the imperium of idiots or can I somehow blame it all on Skanky?
Oy.

Last edited by ravagon on 06-05-2003 at 06:37