Colony

Colonies are the foundation of every empire. In most universes, depending on the level of Astrophysics, additional planets can be colonized — these planets are called colonies.

Colonizing a New Planet

To colonize a planet, you need a Colony Ship and a sufficiently high level of Astrophysics. First, you need to search the galaxy menu for a free position in the universe where you want to colonize a planet.

Once you have a Colony Ship sitting on a planet and have found a free slot in the universe, you can send the Colony Ship to the respective free coordinates. The order "colonize" must be selected for this. Alternatively, sending it is also possible via the corresponding button directly in the galaxy menu. If the colonization attempt is successful, you'll find the new colony in the overview and in the right sidebar.

In addition, 500 metal and 500 crystal are made available on the colony. The Colony Ship is dismantled to obtain these resources and thus disappears permanently. It also remains lost if the colony is abandoned. Additionally, you can send resources along with the Colony Ship, which are then unloaded on the newly created planet. If you send other ships along with the Colony Ship, they fly back to the starting planet after colonization and unloading the resources.

Once the fleet reaches the target coordinates and everything works out, you receive the following settlement report:

21.08.2026 20:50 Settlers Settlement Report
The fleet reaches the specified coordinates [X:XXX:XX],
finds a new planet there and immediately begins developing it.

A similar message also appears if you attempt to found a new colony without meeting the requirements. In this case, however, the message states that your knowledge of Astrophysics isn't sufficient.

The fleet reaches the specified coordinates [X:XXX:XX], and determines that the planet is suitable for colonization. Shortly after beginning
to develop the planet, the settlers must realize that their knowledge of Astrophysics has not yet sufficiently prepared them for the
conquest of a new planet.

For this reason, the (invalid) colony is immediately abandoned again — this happens automatically — and the Colony Ship returns to its sending planet at the same speed as the outbound flight.

If the coordinates are already settled, or were settled before, the following message appears:

The fleet reaches the specified coordinates [X:XXX:XX], but unfortunately finds an already
colonized planet at the destination. The settlers return, disheartened.

If it was a destroyed planet, the following message appears:

The fleet reaches the specified coordinates [X:XXX:XX], but unfortunately
finds no planet at the destination. The settlers return, disheartened.

Colony Settled — Keep It?

Fundamentally, every player has to decide for themselves whether to keep a new planet or delete it. The most important decision criteria are the field count and temperature of the new colony.
Since it's not possible to set a general minimum, players should think of a realistic building plan before colonizing. Based on such a plan, you can determine your individual minimum requirements well. Due to unforeseeable changes in the game and/or your own playstyle, you should also plan for a certain buffer.

Naming a Colony

Every settled planet can be labeled with a name. These names can be changed as often as you like. Note that special characters may possibly cause problems or errors.

Abandoning a Colony

Any established colony can be abandoned, i.e. deleted. Moons are deleted along with their associated planets.

A colony cannot be abandoned as long as your own spaceships/fleets are still flying to or from it. But if the ships aren't "in motion", the colony can be deleted.

When abandoning a colony, the points earned along with the buildings (including defense installations) are lost as well. However, defense installations can be sold to the scrap dealer beforehand. To determine the point loss in advance, you can calculate the colony's value — calculators for this are available from various community sources.

Colony Types

There are different ways to use individual colonies.

Raid Colony

The sole purpose of these colonies (also called "wandering colonies") is to station your own fleet in order to reduce flight paths and times. With these colonies, you can open up entirely new raiding territory that would otherwise be unreachably far away. These colonies are often found in pairs, so the fleet can be safely saved. Raid colonies are often relocated, since they have hardly any resources invested in them, making abandonment and recolonization cheap.

Resource Colony

This type of colony is mainly found among miners. The main purpose of resource colonies is resource production. This is why they mostly feature highly developed mines. The resources produced here are initially invested straight back into further mine levels on the planet; later they're regularly collected by transporters to keep the accumulated resource amount from growing too large. Depending on the frequency of collection, medium to large storage is needed. Defense should likewise be scaled reasonably relative to the accumulating resources (see game economics). The fleet effort is limited to the cargo ships needed for transport. To save costs, mines should generally be developed evenly across all colonies.

There are also colonies specialized in deuterium, located at the back system positions (13-15). Due to the cooler planet temperatures there, more deuterium is produced. The difference in production can amount to up to 2 mine levels. The downside is the low energy supply from Solar Satellites. Later in the game, though, energy costs play an increasingly minor role compared to mine costs. Pure deuterium colonies, i.e. featuring exclusively Deuterium Synthesizers, however, make no economic sense.

Resource Base

The resource base serves as a collection point for the resource colonies. Only very large planets, ideally with moons, are suitable for this, since besides the mines, storage must also reach a high level. In addition, defense installations should be more heavily built up here as well. Since these colonies are used as a trading and fleet-saving base, the cargo fleet should be sized so that the sum of the delivered resources can effortlessly be transported away in one go. To protect the higher amount of resources, miners often turn these planets into "bunkers" as well. These planets often also serve as fleet bases and research centers. Concentrating on a few bases for fleet and production saves time when fleet saving.

Fleet Base

Practically every fleet has one or more home bases where it's normally found. At the start, this is usually the main planet; later this is often one of the colonies, due to the small size of the home planet. Fleet bases are usually characterized by a high-level Nanite Factory and Shipyard for building out raid loot, and you'll often find a moon here too, ideally with a Jump Gate. The mines are usually high here as well, but the specialization toward the fleet clearly dominates, at least for larger fleets. Especially if this planet is the player's only planet in this galaxy, it's advisable to choose a position as close to the middle of the galaxy as possible. This lowers deuterium costs for flights to the rest of the galaxy and provides a sometimes significant advantage for actions affected by range (sensor phalanx, Impulse Drive for interplanetary missiles).

Transit Colony

A special case during the relatively early build-up phase of the game is the transit colony. Transit colonies are used to settle remote areas — for example in distant galaxies — with modest deuterium and fleet-slot consumption. Due to the limited number of planets, this tactic is only applied in a few cases.

These colonies serve various purposes:

Early expansion of your sphere of influence -> You can push into quieter or livelier regions of the universe early on, either to build more peacefully or to raid faster.
Reducing the time a fleet slot is occupied -> To settle a planet one or more galaxies away, the Colony Ship is often on the road for 6-24 hours. During this time, you can't switch to vacation mode, can't yet use the new colony, and don't even know how large it will turn out to be. Cargo ships meant to speed up the initial build-up are also on the road for at least another 2-10 hours between galaxies. A stopover in between creates more flexibility in time management, since more fleet slots are available. Especially early in the game, though, this is more of a disadvantage, since it incurs additional costs for further Colony Ships.
More targeted deuterium consumption -> A single flight to the neighboring system of a Colony Ship needs about 250 deuterium, and a multiple of that to more distant galaxies. The Colony Ship itself can only transport 7,500 units, so without cargo ship escort (which then also has to fly back empty, taking the same time again) it can only colonize 3 systems at maximum speed.

If you can first deploy the ships halfway to the destination, you may not have to give up flying at maximum speed.

Transit colonies can also initially be created in the intended target system, to avoid starting your mining colonies out of false frugality on planets that are too small and would later need to be deleted again at a high point cost. Once the remote area has been developed, you simply delete the low-potential colonies as needed.

Graviton Research Colony

The Graviton Research colony is usually an uneconomical special case among colonies. It serves to research Graviton Research, which requires a huge amount of energy. On planets close to the sun with very high temperatures, up to 60 energy per Solar Satellite can be gained. This is why planets at position 1 are mainly used for this. Compared to researching on a planet at position 4 to 6, which are also relatively warm, this can save several million resources' worth of Solar Satellites — however, the planet usually has to be abandoned again due to its limited size, which often negates the savings effect again. Not least, potential moon chances that arise when shooting down the Solar Satellites are also forfeited.

Distribution of Sizes and Temperatures

See Planet for the field-count/temperature/resource-boost table by planet position, verified against the live pr0game database.

Tips for Colonizing

If several (similarly) good positions are available for colonizing, a special colonization method can be used to save time. Multiple Colony Ships (depending on the desired result, more than 10) are sent in short succession to these desired positions. If a colony turns out to be too small, it's quickly deleted before the next Colony Ship arrives. This lets you run a large number of attempts in a short time to get the field count you want.
If you don't yet have the Astrophysics level needed for a new colony, but it will finish during the colonization flight, you can send the Colony Ship off already, and after Astrophysics completes, press the recalculate button once or twice more just to be safe.

Adapted and cleaned up from owiki.de (GNU Free Documentation License 1.3), a general OGame community wiki — the conceptual explanation applies generally, but specific numbers/formulas may differ from the pr0game source code and are not verified.