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Main: Kyp
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Post Kyp's Colony Guide (WIP)
Did you ever dream of owning a large plot of land, having slaves to make you rich and to fulfil your every desire? To pay them nothing and sell them their very souls? Well then you'll love colonies! In our more enlightened times we refer to our slaves as "workers" or "peasants" but its all the same really. You get to tell them where to go and what to do and get rich off the sweat of their brows!

Now, some people will present colonies to you as a get-rich-quick scheme. Don't let them fool you. Its a long and laborious process, requiring significant investment in time, money, and infrastructure... but the rewards are spectacular. But we're getting ahead of ourselves lads; let us start at the beginning.

In order to make some money from these worthless miscreants you have to have a place to put them. Standard space stations just won't do; we're talking LARGE scale operations here. We need a planet. Got one picked out? Good. You're probably going to have to pick a different one because I haven't told you what to look for yet, but we'll get to that in due time. Get yourself a nice attached station kit and set up shop on the slice of paradise you've picked. Refer to the wonderful Base Building Guide if you need help figuring out your station situation. Once you've got that squared away, pick up a basic colony blueprint from your nearest AI Station and build a couple on your new base. Once that's done, undock and dock again and you'll see a new tab in the station interface.

Colony Interface: Image
The first thing you should note on this screen is the current population. The more people you have under your thumb, the more goods they will buy and the more you'll be able to squeeze out of them. To the right of that, in parenthesis, you'll see the amount your population grew in the last "year" (two hours real-time). This growth number is one of the most important numbers, since you don't really want to move 7.5 billion people to your planet in a zebucart. The growth is affected by the next two numbers listed: suitability and food factor. The starting population is determined by the number of peasants required to build the colonies you built to start with. You can build as many as you like, at any time.

The suitability of your planet is determined by its so-called suitability factors: the atmospheric composition (noxious, terran, gaseous), temperature (frozen, temperate, blistering), and gravity (low, normal, high). You can find more exhaustive information on how these work on our wiki, but suffice to say, for now, that you want Terran Temperate Normal gravity and don't want Gaseous Blistering High gravity. Suitability is the primary factor affecting growth; it starts as a 2% growth per year at 100% suitability and goes up to 3% at 125%, down to no growth at 50%, and -2% at 0% suitability. Before you start worrying about the math let me simplify it for you: at 125% your population doubles roughly every two days of real-time. At some point (~5b population) the growth rate slows and approaches 8 billion asymptotically. If your colony doesn't have 7 billion population your profits will be severely hindered. Toward that end, I would recommend starting your colony out with at least 250K peasants, which should get you to 7B in around a month with 125% suitability.
If you looked at the Suitability Table on the wiki, you may have noticed that highest naturally occurring suitability is 100%, so how do you get to this mythical 125%? Primarily through the Colonial Administrator trade skill, but also through terraforming. Do note that 125% is the maximum possible suitability.

Food factor is a measure of how well you're feeding your slaves, by selling them rations for cheap. They consume 10% of their stockpile every year and will buy more to replenish it, if the price is right. After they've eaten their fill, the remaining stockpile inspires more of the slaves to procreate than usual, producing extra progeny exactly equivilant to 5% of the stockpile of rations. Many people consider this to be an insignificant amount and starve their slaves.

Age is simply how many colony years it has been since the colony's inception. It does not affect anything.

Lastly in this interface you will find a listing of commodities that your slaves are willing to buy, the price they're willing to pay, and how much they bought last year. Most of these are common commodities you should know how to acquire already; there are also five others which appear rarely on planets and can be extracted only by colonists and sold to other colonies for profit.

On all commodities, the colonists' pricing schema follows standard supply-demand mechanics, but know that if a planet has a natural source of a certain commodity their demand for it will be minimal; although apparently they have no processing facilities so the processed forms of those same commodities are still in high demand. For a more extensive treatment of that subject... wiki and google are your friends. In general the big-ticket items most people concern themselves with selling to colonies are nuclear waste, baobabs, and, of course, crack whores.

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Tue Feb 05, 2013 1:29 am
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