My post is slightly off topic.

As others have mentioned, colonizing essentially boils down to colos/turn.
Assuming ore availability, no L4 planet, twarp ship > 1 tpw, cit beamer is the obvious way to go.

There are a few other tasks that can be accomplished for zero extra turns whilst running colos, which might be of interest to those who play low turn games.

For example, moving ore and/or colos from planet to planet in the sector to be colonized.

My post is slightly off topic.

As others have mentioned, colonizing essentially boils down to colos/turn.
Assuming ore availability, no L4 planet, twarp ship > 1 tpw, cit beamer is the obvious way to go.

There are a few other tasks that can be accomplished for zero extra turns whilst running colos, which might be of interest to those who play low turn games.

For example, moving ore and/or colos from planet to planet in the sector to be colonized.

last I checked, those required.. what were they called... oh ya, turns.

Since grabbing anything from a planet costs turns, you can grab cols while grabbing ore from the same planet and not cost you any more turns. However for the newbs watching... if you grab cols from a planet, then ore from a another or from a port... that col grab is costing you a turn. Unless you're in a 250/255 hold ship you are wasting it.

Same goes for grabbing anything, not just cols. Use the right port and you can buydown the cit's requirements as you colonize, or you can move ore from one planet to another as you go (land, grab full ore, lift, land on 2nd planet, drop remainder, go col).

Of course once the planets are going and have what they need there's not much need to move stuff around, so you might as well colonize as efficiently as possible.

In which way?

If you take from a planet that you're not moving stuff from... then you're grabbing an extra load per. Every time you grab a load you incur a 1 turn penalty when you lift or enter the cit, with a max of 1 turn spent (you can pick up, put back, pick up, put back, but it still costs you one turn). So if you're trying to move org, equ, whatever, from a 3rd planet, that's costing you a turn. Except most colo ships don't have 255 holds, so you're spending a turn for less result.

In the 2nd set, once you have stuff going and you don't need to move org or eq or cols around any more you might as well use your turn to buy ore from the port. You can always use ore for that hungry tpad. In that sense, using your turns on anything else that's not immediately neccessary is probably a waste in the long term.