Accidently deleted a planet, mid game

I just went and retested it. Maybe I read it wrong the first time. This time it asked about destroying the colony. So I accepted and it wasted it. I'll assume that's what happened the first time, too.

Maybe this is useful if you think the planet is about to be lost and you wish to prevent the attacker from getting anything. But it seems a little unrealistic to me. This turned it to size zero and permanently made it useless. That seems a little harsh to me.

Wow, thats a ton more up front than the normal self-destruct that I knew of. The one I knew was buried deep into the colony manager screen inside the planet details sub-screen. It then had the yes/no pop-up. A few more button-guards than what you encountered.

Just to know for next time however, you could have launched the colony ship from the planet with just 1 passenger on it, then while it was in space, decommission it. A better option if there is any other thing near by is to either upgrade the colony ship into a troop transport (if the technology is known), a mining ship or a constructor. At least then you'd still get some use from the cargo-hull class ship.

One other use for a un-needed colony ship though is as a ferry. Sure you can only move 0.25b people a shot, but you can move people from a high pop planet to a low pop planet. This is especially useful for low PQ planets that actually have a population cap to what it can grow to. Note, this isn't the population cap the food supply limits you at. A low PQ planet (lets say a PQ$) has a limit to it that it can naturally progress to by itself. Most secondary planets in your home system are very low PQ planets and would have a noticeable population growth cap imposed.

For more reading on this subject, please look at this wiki thread:
https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Population_growth

Some good tips there. I normally would have just decommissioned it with one person aboard. But wanted to see if it could be done differently. I didn't actually expect to find another method, as there hasn't really been other methods for a while now.

But I hadn't actually thought of using it to ferry people from place to place. That could be useful in getting you to the max tax base quicker. I also never thought of trying to convert it to another ship. But I especially like the ferry idea.

Note a troop transport is a far better ferry than a colony ship due to the limitation of a single colony module per ship that doesn't exist for the troop module. Plus the upgrade cost is minimal if you keep the speed about the same. That does assume you have the tech for a troop transport.

I find that I do often "top off" my PQ3's, PQ4's and PQ5's to the 6B that they can support but otherwise can't reach by simple pop growth. In larger galaxies there's not much advantage to doing this as the income increase isn't noticeable but I do it anyway just to have all my planets nice and consistent. On smaller games you can actually notice the slight benefit of the resultant income increase that you get from this.

Using transports (or dedictated "bus" ships) can be handy on larger maps to help you quickly make new colonies a harder target for invasion. The peeps have more than economic value--they're also the local militia.

I guess you learn something new every day. I had no idea that there was a different max pop then what they can spawn on their own. I will definitely look further into this.

This can also help keep other more populated planets from flipping your new empty planet. Very good when a minor quits and gives you its last planet next to a very high influence AI player.

It can also help you sneak low pop planets away from allied AI when you research techs that let you claim toxic, water, etc. type planets. Plant an extra farm on a high pop planet and use the planet's big population explosion to load a colony ship every few turns. Keep multiple ships going back and forth between your population producer planets and your newly detoxified empty one.