Last night Got to play as far as making the colony ship II, where I noticed we get a new colony with a 50 pop start off. Wow that wasn't bad , and in a few cases you're high enough to start making the shipyards right off the bat if you chose your colony right. The only thing that kind of bugged me, was that the colony is all new fresh and shiny, but they are using level 1 Mid 22nd Century Tech, for the farms, industrial base and power.

what I propose is to steal a page from Civilization 4, and when you get to the point you can create colony II ships Have them create Level 2 farms industry Power Etc this way your colony catches up a little faster with the rest of the Federation, as well as become more productive earlier. And when you put down the colony III ship Level 3 or maybe even 4 Tech.

the way I see it is a colony ship may not send a colony out with state of the art all bells and whistles , but they would send out the best equipment they can that has been time proven, and designed to get the colony on it's feet in the shortest time available.

Good suggestion. We will see what Mike says. This is what the colonyships will look like in the 3D views for the Federation as it stands now:

Colonyship I

Colonyship II

Colonyship III


This is not set in stone but it sure does seam like you should get more bang for your latnum.