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So how many colonies do you like to run on say a 1400 star galaxy?

How many do you find you can adequately defend?

And what's your limit before enough is enough?

I enjoy the challenge of expanding and trying defend it all. Currently have 41 colonies in my latest game, but due to playing on extreme difficulty, and very strong pirates, a number of the small colonies get consistently raided. It's fun trying to protect them all, but extremely difficult to manage it all.

And yet, despite this, I continue to build more colony ships

So how many colonies do you like to manage?

I have not played that much the last couple of years, and not with strong pirates, extreme difficulty and 1400 stars. Apart from that...

The defense that can be had depends on economy, which depends on good colonies. So I would not colonize blindly until the economy feels strong, since poor colony prospects will never help the economy much. However, as the empire grows, any "interior" colony should be perfectly safe, and colonizing won't hurt since there will be no expense on defending the colony. I will put a premium on "clean borders", possibly shared with a good ally. This is a requirement to have "interior colonies" that are safe.

So in early game I would want "not so many", and in later game it is "whatever" but why bother playing at that point?

The above is a result on how I see the AI behave during war. Like I do, they attack the closest colonies, but they may not always go for the very closest since they have some other kind of ideas, possibly on colony quality of some kind. So any interior colony will be safe since there are no nasty AIs anywhere nearby.

Before expanding to anything other than good colonies, I would defeat the pirates in my area. If I have respawning pirates and I am bothered by new groups appearing in my "interior", I will make sure to put something (like a mine) in every single system there that have a fuel source. If there is no system for pirates to spawn in or set up base in, they won't...

Be aware that people can play this game in many different ways, my games may not look very much like yours.

Depending on my role I am using in the current game.
Aggressive games I never bother developing Colonization tech at all, adopting a more militaristic why should I colonize when 'THEY' will do it for me. I then spend the RP on better Troops.
More Passive games I may swarm the universe and land everywhere as fast as I can.

So the proper answer is, it depends.

Get your neighbors to like you, or fear you. Don't plant isolated colonies or ones in contested spaces. Eliminate pirates to reduce threats and corruption. Then you will be better able to keep the colonies you do plant.