and you should be spending your time dropping your geology teams on small moons.
You know you can just create a colony on a new world/moon/asteroid then disband the team and recreate it on the new colony right?
That is basically an exploit, and it can be a pain in the ass to find your guys over and over, more-so while assigning ship officers.
What do geology teams do, anyways? I've never used them... I don't even know how to make them.
Basically, a geology team 'finds' (creates out of thin air) extra minerals, and/or increase accessibility.
in the teams/academy tab of the planet tab, under 'form new team (select five team members from qualifying officers)', the drop-down box, geology, it might be a good idea to also hit the box 'unassigned only',
make sure that the overall team skill is 90 or more as the chance the team will decide that they can't find anymore minerals is (I think I remember) [geology team skill]/100 with a minimum of 10%.
I can definitely see the advantage of mine ships over conventional mines for small asteroids. A 5 cargo bay freighter with a tractor beam could drop 10 mines in one go, or a 9 mines and a mass driver to deliver them to earth. Then when you've strip mined the tiny asteroid, you can come back and get the entire complex in one go. Much easier logistically.
Yes, yes, my ass is kicked already, stop it!
still, you can get
much more minerals by geology teams inspecting moons and planets and dropping mines off instead of going asteroid to asteroid, asteroid mining still works though.
Double Edit: Nevermind. Apparently now I can see the galaxy Proxima Centauri... and there are two possible colonies here. Awesome!
This bodes badly...
Triple Edit: Aaaand... I have made thermal contact. 2000 thermal, either precursor or NPR with no thermal reduction. They're really friggin fast, and they blasted my gravsurvey ships with energy or kinetic weapons. Interesting. I'm hoping for precursor, I really don't want aggressive NPR's one jump away from earth.
Knew it.
Quadruple Edit: And that's game. The precursor ships (checked SM mode) have come through the warp. The only military research I've done is sensors. I don't even have war ships yet, and those things are within sensor range of earth. Might as well have done a zero point embark next to a skarp river. Oh well, losing is fun.
General Colt:'Fire the ICBM's!... wait, we never thought of aliens now did we?'