How to use colonists

[Twotribes]

What do I do with colonists?

[budd]

Basically to bump up population.maybe a new city/zone needs population for workers/ military

[AttuWatcher]

Build a truck station first and then you can send them in to start a new city / zone.

[Twotribes]

Where is the order to do that? What window?

[ZygfrydDeLowe]

There is a Colonisation order on the right panel, next to the orders to Raise Formation etc. But if you want to create a new City/Zone, you have to construct a building and check the "Create a new Zone" checkbox in the upper right corner of the construction window.

[FlashXAron_slith]

... even I played up to 50 turns before I ran out of resources in my epic games
I never had the feelings I should build a new town because of resources shortage and not having the tech to produce my own resources out of thin air,

maybe when the old one has grown to max size ?


So makes it sense to build a new one early, or what are the reasons I want to build one , as I hate it normal to manage too many of them (Oh how I hate Civ and Planetfall for that)
Maybe SHQ too far away and I need a second one ?

THX

[KingHalford]

Colonists are easy in this game: you pay some population to join the colonist list, when you need to populate a zone (either existing or a new one) you just add them with a slider. None of that Civ-style crap you get in most games, it's more like Master of Orion in that respect and I love the simplicity.

By the way, whilst it's mostly easier in the early-mid game to take cities by force, you'll eventually have enough zones that you'll be getting a lot of colonists: in one of my games I had 100k colonists at all times and was able to create new cities every few turns (be careful with that obviously! logistical issues abound!)

[Soar_Slitherine]

ORIGINAL: FlashXAron_slith

So makes it sense to build a new one early, or what are the reasons I want to build one , as I hate it normal to manage too many of them (Oh how I hate Civ and Planetfall for that)

If a zone has a significant portion of its assets more than 6 hexes away from the capitol, its governor bonuses start to get hit with an "administrative strain" penalty.

The civilian economy in each zone also gets a boost of up to about 25 credits a turn from a "hidden economy" representing small scale economic activity and intended to permit a small population to survive in zones that haven't yet built assets, so every added zone provides a small baseline of economic power.