So I need a checklist for all the ships I need in a expanding and maintaining empire
Freighter
Colony ship
Geo/grav ship
Tanker
Coiler
Maintenance ship
Fuel harvester station
Jump stabilizer
Umm remind me if I’m forgetting anything else
Need to make a terraformer
Tugs to get the stations where you want them.
Some level of military. Even with spoilers off you’ll need protection points or your colonies will become unstable and not produce anything
I suppose that’s it from a quick glance.
Supply ships.
Coiler - missiles; supply - MSP.
If you don’t use military ships (all NPR are off), you don’t need coilers, supply and maintenance ships.
You can use ground forces (some thousands of PWL infantry) to decrease colony unrest, similar to military ship protection - so you will not consume MSP at all.
Dedicated colliers aren’t necessary if your primary combatants are direct fire ones, yet I tend to produce a set of components necessary to build several colliers as fast as possible in case I’d need to launch mass missile production and deployment (no need to keep much of these ships built as your missile factories would need at least several months to stamp significant quantities of missiles to deploy). It’s also possible to use carriers to move missiles between colonies and rearm missile combatants in case it’s urgently necessary. Carriers are also capable of moving some light warships with highly boosted engines to save fuel, if you lack tugs to do it.
Maintenance ships are also optional, it’s ok to use forvard planetary bases. Supply ships are more necessary, because it needs time to build sufficient amounts of supplies locally, while intensive combat eats supplies quite significantly just to fire large guns. No need to build large ones, though, before your battle fleet exeeds several megatons of inert mass.
Harvesters are useful, yet not necessary if you have some Sorium deposits. Still quite tedious to use with the current version.
Orbital terraformers are useful with boosted terraforming speed (to terraform venusians), yet generally are not necessary, you can use surface terraforming intallations instead.
The same with orbital miners, which are even more micromanagemental.
Think about dedicated buoy deployment craft, though they aren’t strictly necessary too.
I’d recommend to build several large commercial-grade jump tenders to move your transports through a chain of non-stabilized JPs in case of urgent necessity.
Troops Transports are absolutely necessary, at least 1 or 2, to deploy police/security garrisons before colonies start seceding. I’d recommend to build quite large ones, to not bother with sequences of small units to move one by one.
Maybe prepare a small salvager to save minerals in case some of your military ships will blow up accidentally. Not necessary, yet sometimes useful and very roleplayish even before stumbling upon any alien wrecks.
Between the military ships, if you have good enough technologies, at least one model using cloaking.