Colony

A colony is a new planet created by a Gaia Class Colony Ship. Each colony allows a player to establish a new set of mines, buildings, defenses, etc., just like they have on their homeworld. Colonies share crew points and research with their homeworld. A player may have up to 8 colonies in addition to their homeworld.

A new colony has a random number of fields assigned when it is colonized as described below. A user can abandon a planet and then recolonize it to possibly change the number of fields on the colony.

Temperature affects how much energy is gained from Solar Satellites and how much hydrogen is created from Hydrogen Synthesizers. The closer a planet is to the sun, the hotter it will generally be and thus the more energy it will gain from Solar Satellites. The further away a planet is from spot 1, the colder it will typically be which means more hydrogen from Hydrogen Synthesizers.

Planet Sizes

Planet sizes are first determined using a normal distribution, based on a mean and standard deviation (see table blow) which are both determined by what planet slot is being colonized. If the Gaussian random number generator returns a value outside of 1 standard deviation away from the mean in either direction (which occurs roughly 32% of the time) instead a uniformly distributed random number between 40 and 320 is used. No planet larger than 320 or smaller than 40 may exist.

Planet Slot	Mean Size	Standard Deviation
1	64	16
2	58	15
3	73	14
4	173	65
5	167	72
6	155	73
7	144	29
8	140	27
9	159	30
10	101	22
11	98	18
12	105	22
13	110	50
14	84	42
15	101	48

NOTE: The Gaia Class Colony Ship is automatically destroyed in the process of creating a Colony. Any ships sent with the Gaia Class will be deployed to the new colony if it is created. If someone manages to colonize a slot before your colonization mission arrives, your fleet (including the Gaia) will return to the world it was sent from.

Colonization

There are two ways to send a colonization mission. From the Galaxy page you may simply click "colonize" wherever you see an empty planet like so:

Also you may send one from the Fleets page by selecting a Gaia Class (plus any accompanying ships you like), putting in the coordinates you want to send to, making sure the "Colonize" mission type is selected, and hitting "Dispatch".