If you don't use scouts, it is generally worthwhile to stop the colony ship one step before it actually colonises the planet (if it is possible to do) and look at the remaining unveiled planets in the same star system for better prospects. For sure, you don't want to send colony ships or scouts blindly out to empty space with no star systems or to see if there is even a star system there! You must make a habit of using the minimap to send your colony ships or scouts directly to those planets. I would say without this tech, the effectiveness of a colony rush strategy is minimised.

That said there are a few rules that generally hold. Leaving aside playing style, which method is most efficient depends critically on the game settings in particular, number of opponents, abundance of stars, planets and habitable planets and size of map. This is not an autoloss of course, but not very fun.ДЄlthough all colony rush methods agree on the goal, there are many diverse ways to achieve the objective. Most probably you won't have time to play yourself out of this, before all habitable planets are snapped up. Also the luck factor will mean sometimes you are stuck in a bad position so your rush build colony ships become white elephants. On the other hand if you try tiny or medium maps with 9 opponents, no matter how good you are at colony rush, you will find you can colonise at most 1-3 more planets than a typical AI empire, which is good but isn't a big deal. I have played 3-4 'intelligent' opponents on medium maps, where I colonised over 60% of the map, instead of the usual 20-25%! Needless to say the game was over pretty quick. General effectiveness of colony rush strategies Дespite attempts by stardock to tone down the effectiveness of this strategy, it is still an extremely powerful one and with the right settings and strategy you can easily outcolonise an intelligent AI by a lot, making the game effectively won. That said in the long run colony rush strategies can be very effective, because if you can keep the AI off your back long enough, eventually, the advantage of having more development space and hence more productive colonies will begin to tell. Thirdly and more directly such strategies often damage your economy due to rush builds of both factories and colonies, which may cause your economy to overheat particularly if you rush build factories on bonus tiles. Secondly, new colonies generally end up in the red, particularly if you build only factories, starports and labs. Since more citzens means more tax income, this indirectly means in the short run your income will be less. Once they reach the new colony, their growth is much slower compared to if they remained on the homeworld because population growth uses the base pop as one of its variables. This will probably hurt your economy in the short term in several ways.ДЇirstly, citizens sent off on colony ships may take several turns to reach their destination, they don't contribute to the growth at the time. The colony rush strategy refers to a strategy where your main aim is to occupy as many high quality planets before the AI can do it. 5 Colony-build strategy: the all-X approach.1.3.2 Technological rush for propulsion techs*.1.3 Specific colony rush strategies and approaches.1.2.5 Colonise High PQ planets, ignore low ones.1.2.3 Plan to build new jump pads for colony ships.

1.1 General effectiveness of colony rush strategies.

Galactic civilizations 3 ships