Scrapping colony ships

[Chris21wen]

What happens to the colonists on board if you do?

[feelotraveller]

They get spaced if you merely scrap the ship. If you retire it at a colony the onboard colonists get added to the colony population.

[Chris21wen]

ORIGINAL: feelotraveller

They get spaced if you merely scrap the ship. If you retire it at a colony the onboard colonists get added to the colony population.

I was hoping that was the case.

[dostillevi]

Has anyone experimented with using multiple colony ships to build up new colonies more quickly using this mechanism? Is it worth trying?

[DarkThug]

ORIGINAL: feelotraveller

They get spaced if you merely scrap the ship. If you retire it at a colony the onboard colonists get added to the colony population.

Can anyone confirm this. I would really love it if that is the case.
Actually I will do it when I'm home today.

[Osito]

ORIGINAL: DarkThug

ORIGINAL: feelotraveller

They get spaced if you merely scrap the ship. If you retire it at a colony the onboard colonists get added to the colony population.

Can anyone confirm this. I would really love it if that is the case.
Actually I will do it when I'm home today.

As far as I can see you have to retire at a shipyard, and furthermore I have not seen any planetary population increase when retiring colony ships. Would be nice if someone else could confirm this, so we know the position.

Osito

[Jim D Burns]

Even if this potential exploit works, I don't think it would be advisable to use as a good strategy in game. Civilian passenger ships help new colonies grow pretty fast. I don't know what the cut-off population is that slows down immigration via passenger liners, but my guess it's around 300-500 or so. Before planet populations grow to that level passenger liners visit new colonies pretty frequently and get the populations up a lot faster (and cheaper) than using disbanded colony ships would.

Just make sure you queue up lots of resort bases early in the game so the civilian economy builds lots of passenger liners to service them. Once the civilian economy has lots of liners built, you'll see dozens of them temporarily divert away from tourism runs and appear at new colonies soon after they get created stuffed full of immigrants. This does dry up tourism income temporarily though, so don't over-build to a point that you need that income to stay in the black.

Jim

[feelotraveller]

I just tested with prewarp setting and did not get the population from the colony ship.

I certainly remember occasions where I did get the population added to my colony in Legends (retiring colonisers for tech...). It was clear to see since sometimes it was an alien race I did not yet have contact with.

So now I do not know if there is some tech requirement of if this was a change made for Shadows.

Apologies for the bad info.

[Osito]

Perhaps scrapping the colony ship no longer increases the number of colonists, but instead provides a mysterious increase in the level of Ekarus meat at the colony