Official Newbie question thread

Ok, lots of great questions on this one, so long answer

Orbital Mining

Space stations are better. In terms of maintenance per tonnage, they are more efficient because of maintenance cost structures and because they can dedicate a larger percentage of their space to pure mining activities. Also in the early game you can quickly design and thus build large space stations that can hold more orbital mining components. Consider: an early large space station can hold four mining components and costs about 7500 resources, while a small star-liner for about the same cost can hold only 2.

Now, its true that a space ship miner could potentially escape an enemy ship, but lets think about this in practice. The enemy is attacking, with presumably purpose-built fast warships. In a turn-based game you need 1 turn's heads up that they are coming, and even then may not be able to outrun them, especially if they have a couple purpose-built fast raiders.

To be honest, if you have hostile borders where this is a problem, then you have bigger concerns than getting a few mining stations up near the front lines. Find a way to stabilize your borders, one way or the other. I suppose if you had a prolonged war with a really volatile front line it may make sense to have a couple mobile miners, but really in the grand scheme of thing it would be a rather niche demand.  My experience is that in large wars "no-man's land" tends to turn into a desert where nobody risks investing resources anymore until the situation stabilizes.

Also, don't forget you can defend sectors "for free" with mines, satellites, and even putting defensive weapons on your orbital miners.  Although they do have an initial cost to build, and the ship transporting them to location and deploying them obviously costs maintenance, mine fields and satellites cost no maintenance. As such, they are the perfect small-scale immobile defence. They won't stop entire fleets, but will deter raiders. And if your production is grinding to a halt due to lack of resources, you can just keep producing such units since they don't add to your maintenance cost. 


About mining itself, you're pretty much right. Planets with moons are great for building orbital miners because essentially their resource values stack. So a large planet with 40% 115% 120% and a moon with 70% 100% 90% will give the miner a 110! 215% 210% bonus to their resource production.

And yeah, build the right miners to the right planets. Keep in mind that in the beginning of the game you can only fit at most 4 mining modules on a large station, so pick your modules wisely. For instance, over a planet with 25% minerals 90% organics 120% radioactives, I would typically build a large orbital miner that has two farming components and two radioactive mining components. If you build a mineral miner on a planet with 0% mineral value, you will get 0 minerals and the miner will operate at a loss because its maintenance costs minerals...

Colonies

Right again on the colonies, mostly. One of the great things about this mod is that colonies tend to develop uniquely based on their circumstances. The critical facilities depend on the type of colony. But there are a few important rules. At least one colony in every system needs a spaceport, otherwise the resources produced in that system will NOT reach your empire's coffers (Note that this DOES NOT apply to orbital miners...they don't need a space port). Generally you also want 1 supply station in each system to keep your ships topped off. Frequently both of these facilities are built at your primary colony in the system...but its not necessary to do that if you don't want to.

Space Yards are frequently a very important facility to build on a colony, because a space yard on a planet gets a big production bonus depending on the size of the colony population. The more people on the colony, the better the space yard produces. The marginal increase on this is rapid until about 10m people, begins to really slow down after about 50m people, and stops increasing at about 3500m (Hint: keep at least 3500 people on your homeworld to maximize its production!).

There are many situations where you may not put a space yard on a colony. Maybe its a tiny planet and you only intend to use the colony as a supply depot. Maybe you are treaty-bound by another player not to have a space yard on it (although its hard for them to check and see if you're keeping your promise). Maybe its a small farming colony and you can't be bothered. But most of the time, its a good idea to put a yard on it.


Another important thing about colonies is not to just build the resource extraction facilities; build an accompanying cultural facility. The colony cultural facility represents the society living on the colony, and provides key bonuses. A colony without one will produce quite a bit less of whatever resource they are producing. At first you can only build a basic settlement or colonial community, but with upgrading and research you can build farming communities (ideal for a colony with farms), cities, etc. The "Cultural Center" facility on your homeworld represents the most advanced form of this "cultural facility", and although in theory it can be built on colonies don't bother, since its construction rate would literally take a couple thousand turns. Focus instead on eventually building a city on your more important, richer colonies, and them progressively upgrading it. To see all the different possible kinds of colony facilities, start up a game with high technology and look at all the facilities that can be built.