Need some basic help

1 use the spanner button if you set the display to construction you can see what all your colonies is producing at the moment if any thing and select single or multiple construction quest there is a selector on the RHS of the screen to do this. You can also upgrade every thing you can upgrade in you empire at once. Play with this screen its very powerful and very useful.

2 Storage is empire wide building new stores expands the capacity and allows you to store production surpluses. At the beginning of a game the stores you already have start off as full. The best places to build stores are planets with low resources and I would scatter storage thought your empire to prevent loses to attacks

That’s what I meant

Facility space on a planet is fixed, except that it is possible to convert a domed colony to an undommed one and undommed colonies have more space than a domed colony. There is technology you can research to do this or you can conquer or have migrate into your empire a race which can breath the atmosphere and by moving population about populate the formerly domed colony with people who don’t need the domes.

Planets marked in red will require Domes, those in green wont.

Also, Planet storage is the amout of units that that planet can hold. (Sats,mines,and troops)

Yes excess resources that can't be stored are throw out at the end of your turn.

In the top row of buttons there is a wrench icon. It brings up a list of all of your construction queues. If you click the layout button you can setup a custom layout that has Facility space used, Facility space total, what's being constructed, etc. One of the default layouts probably has that information too, but I prefer making my own.

In stock, level 2 colony techs give you more cargo space on the colonizer component. For the research cost it's almost completely useless. I'm not sure about the research tree, though.

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Watch for my mod - codename: Dimensions - coming by Summer, 2007!