Tip 26 - Extreme Planet Development

In the following picture you can see the little heavy gravity icon has changed from red to yellow.  This indicates I can now colonize it, but it's not optimal.

Tip 27 - Civilization Manager - Colonies

This section is tantamount to managing your empire.  You can use F2 to planet hop, but you really need a full view of the ALL your colonies at once.  Click the Civ Manager button and switch to the Colonies tab.

You'll be presented with this view (below).  This is a powerful screen, so what can you do here?

• You can sort all the categories, by clicking its header (Colony, Class, Population, etc). 
• You can go directly to a planet  by clicking its name.  When you're done with that planet view, it'll bring you right back here!
• You can see why you're losing so much money (all my colonies are losing money!)
• You can see why everyone hates you, and then go to the worst offending planets and help them out.
• You can change what ship is being built.
• After you've been here once, every time you click F6 you'll be right back in this screen (unless you select another tab and exit.
• You can set work priorities.  These are very important, just like adjusting your domestic spending.  See below.

See those little icons?  The shield, the hammer, and the blue thing?  That's military production, social production, and research production (respectively).  You can prioritize funding by clicking the category.  If you look at Saturn and Saturn I.  They're both producing freighters and I need money BAD.  Freighters will bring in trade money so I want them to get out there as soon as possible.  So I'm going to prioritize the military spending (military spending = shipbuilding). 

Now you can see it will take Saturn I only 8 weeks to make a freighter instead of 12 weeks.  But this will hurt it's social production (building improvements on the planet), and research.  But I don't care about those right now... I just need those freighters (trade ships done).  Normally I have one or two planets that are decked out for research, and then I'd prioritize those planets here.  But I haven't done that yet in this mission.

If you switch to the planet view... you'll see the figures are posted there as well (see red arrows below).  You can click the boxes to adjust priorities here too!  Remember, there's multiple ways to accomplish the same task!

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