In the grand scheme of things though, that empire size increase from having 28% increased tech costs is nothing. Not colonizing anything would have netted me a grand total of 0 additional techs. I could have 8 colonies slowly slowly slowly building up pop or I could have 0 additional techs. It's a pretty easy choice here.
In the grand scheme of things, 28% is 28%. Simple arithmetic says that if you hadn't been paying 28% extra for them, you would have finished 7, or possibly 8 (though the way all 3 branches advance/complete simultaneously makes that not accurate, with such a small number of techs).
Keep in mind that the cost you pay for a tech is your empire size increase
when you complete it. So if your empire size is low early, but higher by the time you finish your first round of techs, you pay the higher price (not some average).
But let's do a concrete comparison: making 8 colonies vs. just colonizing the guaranteed habitables in the first 6 years of the game.
Let's assume you're expanding at a fairly constant pace (like, a colony ship every 3 years, to hit 8 built by 2224). That means your average colony age is 12 years, your average tech costs over this time were increased by around 14% (this assumes you completed the first set of techs at 0% increased tech cost, then completed the second recently at 28%). And let's assume you migrate zero pops out onto your newly developed colonies for the sake of stability; we act as if colonies take zero pops from the capital.
You also say you build
a couple of Drone Storages on every planet: that's another ~1000 minerals per colony, and (average) 2 energy upkeep per month.
You've only gotten 6 techs done (2 techs in each category). T1 techs cost 2000-3000 each, but your average tech increase is 1.14x, so we'll say that's ~15k research.
- 15k on research
- 8*(4*200+500)=10k on colony ships
- 8*1000=8k on drone storage.
- 8*12*(2*4+1+5+2)=1.5k on assembly/colony upkeep costs just for pop growth (assuming 12 years average colony age).
~35k spent on research and expansion.
By contrast, if you'd just colonized your guaranteed habitables in the first ~6 years (average colony age of 21), and then distributed everything you aren't spending to research:
- 2*(4*200+500)=2.6k on colony ships
- 2*1000=2k on Drone Storage (assuming you're sticking to this)
- 3*21*(2*4+1+5+2)=1k on assembly/colony upkeep costs just for pop growth.
- Which leaves 29.4k on research, which will be 13% cheaper without the tech cost increase. At 2.5k each, that will get you 11 (almost 12) techs, instead of 6.
So you get double the tech, and you also invest 2/3 as much into assembly (and will have received 2/3 as many pops). So, by this extremely rough estimate, you're cutting your tech in half in order to get 50% more pops (during this particular time).
Going forward, you will have more instantaneous assembly. But at this particular point in time, you've traded the other fruits of your economy (namely, research) for investment into future growth.
And, to repeat,
that's probably a smart move. Investing in the future is good. And while research/colonization are both investments, it's easier to catch up on research.
Just be aware that every colony is an investment of resources, upkeep, and empire size that will take 2-3 decades to pay for itself. So don't expect immediate returns when most of what you've done is spam that investment button as often as possible.
As for the alloys, 60 alloys a month is almost nothing. And it's what allows my energy to be net positive, as that alloy production has enabled me to build up to my starbase cap. And all of my starbases save the capital shipyards and the border chokepoint are energy producers. The also AI is insanely aggressive in this patch, you have to keep your fleet built up as much as you can. You'll note that one of the AIs attacked me in a suicidal war, so I've had to rebuild my fleet a few times as they suicide into me over and over. This is already the 2nd war in this game, as one of the other AIs on that side of the map also attacked me around 2015 in yet another suicidal war.
Now, if I didn't need the alloys to not die, I could nuke a couple of those alloy factories on the capital and that would let me transform a couple mineral districts into nexus districts and transit those pops over to tech. Maybe I'd get one additional tech from that. Maybe. But the issue here seems to be tech costs. 140 months to research the lowest tier techs seems... not right.
You've spent over 2000 alloys on colony ships and pop assembly on your brand new colonies. Evidently you
don't need the alloys to not die, at least not as much as you think you need it for new colonies.
And 60 alloys per month is most definitely not nothing,
for your empire at this time. Again... 60 alloys is roughly the same size as your entire research budget. If you had poured your pops and infrastructure investment into research production instead, you could be making 400 or even 500 research per month now.
Also:
Obviously, don't completely nix alloy production (or assembly), but that's roughly the scale of the investment you've made into cranking out colony ships and pops on colonies.
At no point did I actually recommend you stop making alloys completely. I was explicitly giving it as a point of reference for how much you've invested into things other than research.
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