Colony Module + Troop Module

Ive tried it before, if you're doing it during the rush phase, you have to consider the tradeoff of the extra cost of making the ship slowing down your ability to grab the planet before another race. I would rather make a seperate troop transport and "ferry" people over at a later time, and still retain the transport to use later when I want to invade something.

ya, I agree.

At lower dificulties it may not matter (too) much, but at the higher ones speed is everything imo.
So, the extra 1-2 turns per colony ship may well mean lots of less colonies for you which you are going to miss later on.

Like Piznit I prefer to build a specialied "Ferry" ship (I usually have a normal troop module on it + as much engines as possible) at the earliest oppoortunity (usually when the hot colonization phase is over) and ferry people around. Those ships are usually somewhat more expensive due to the best-available-engines used for those, but they tend to stay in service for a quite long time (I usually have them right behind my invasion forces in orer to refill the population after an invasion etc.

IMO, it depends on your stragegy. If you have lots of planets to grab, having the per-colony cost killing your budget could kill your planet-grabbing ability just as easily as waiting for more expensive ships to build.

I've been experimenting with 2-colony-module ships for a little while, the theory being that 500-million-person colonies can pay more for themselves than 250-million person colonies, as well as grow faster. With the fact that tax is proportional to the square root of a colony's population, financially it's best to evenly distribute your population. With the fact that the same amount of population as part of a large colony grows slower than if they were on their own planet, your population growth is maximized by evenly distributing your population. Therefore, porting larger chunks of population to new colonies not only yields more taxes (meaning you can fund more initial colonies for the same total empire-wide population), but a faster population growth.

So sure you grab fewer colonies in the same amount of time right off the bat, but if there are a lot of planets, you'll do better financially 50-150 turns into the game, and grab many more planets on the 2nd and 3rd wave of colonization than you would if you focused purely on maximizing the number of colonies grabbed in the short-term.

I was experimenting with double- and triple-colony ships, but I like this idea better. I'm going to "ferry" my population around. Also, I think a colony pod carries about 250 people where a troop transport carries like 1,000?

Thanks for the idea.

you can get the same results with two colony pods

While, that's true, it's more expensive per colony ship. I've designed a fast colony ship with 1 colony pod and the fastest engines I can put on it. Then I trail it with a troop transport with 3x adv. troop pods and big engines. I can simply re-use the troop transport, but with the colony pod, I loose the ship when I colonize a planet.

In my last game, I was colonizing a class 1 planet late in the game, after I had researched habitat improvement to make it worthwhile. I used a colony pod plus two advanced troops pods to get the colony going. It's a good strategy in very limited circumstances.