Abandon colony (SEIV)

From SEWiki

It is possible to abandon a colony in Space Empires IV. To do this, simply select the planet and click the abandon colony icon. (Hotkey: Ctrl-A) You will be asked if you are sure you want to abandon the planet. If you have any facilities, you will be asked whether you want to scrap them first. If you do scrap them, you can claim back some of the cost of building them.

If the 'abandon' order is successful, the colony will be removed and the planet will revert back to its uncolonised state- a colony ship will be required to create a new colony there. Any cargo, population and unscrapped facilities on the planet will completely vanish from the game. You will receive no scrap value from any investments destroyed in this way.

The order will be refused if there are too many people on the colony. By default this figure is 50million, but it can be modded by altering the line Maximum Population For Abandon Planet Order := 50 in Settings.txt

The abandon colony order is rarely used. However it does have its uses:

• To comply with another Empire's demand that you remove your colony from a system.
• If the colony is about to be conquered and cannot be defended, abandoning a planet forces the enemy to go to the trouble of re-colonising and re-populating it before they can get make use of it. This can be useful when making lightning raids into enemy space; seizing planets that you cannot hope to keep, scrapping the facilities for resources and leaving empty worlds behind you.
• In some circumstances, an uncolonised planet may be more valuable than a colonised one, because only uncolonised planets can be exploited by remote mining.
• When setting up a scenario, it may be necessary to remove a colony from the map.