IS there any way to destroy one of your colonies WITHOUT blowing up the planet?

Of course. Just destroy the city hall like you would any other colony.

No repurcussions?

Not that I'm aware of. I don't think it's possible to get your own civ to stop liking you.

You can destroy your own colonies, you can reduce the T-level of your own planets, you can do pretty much whatever you want to your colonies without any problem. I think the only thing that happens from an unhappy colony is that they have lowered spice production until you build more entertainment.

Unfortunately, as far as your homeworld is concerned, you cannot blow up the planet, you cannot lose the planet, and even if you destroy all the colonies, you will get one back as soon as you go back into space. Unfortunately, NO MATTER WHAT, all the structures on your homeworld will remain inferior to other worlds.

I never wanted to get rid of my homworld, just those colonies on planets with no spice. (To bad about the inferior homworld buildings though)

I'm curious to know why you'd feel a need to remove any colonies in the first place. Even if they are on a planet without spice they can still be used as refueling stops, buffers from enemies, trading, a place to store objects, wild-life sanctuary, etc.

Cheers.

In the early game that's well and good, however later on, when you have 50+ systems and have most ofyour area under control, all those extra colonies just ends up being somewhere else that you need to drop those planitary upgrades in order to reduce the frequency of pirates and such. It's just 1 less colony that you have to raise to t3, place all your buildings on, and worry about defending. Once you start getting attacked by both grox, pirates, and other empires, you don't want to have to race back to help defend.

Also, since warring empires tend to only attack the nearest colony, you can often just drop a T0 colony somewhere in their area, use that as a base, and not care what happens to it just so that they don't attack anything you care about. When you're done you can just get rid of the colony, along with any others, to allow allies the ability to expand a bit more, and to not have to deal with maintaining or checking in every now and then.

You can also do this with my isolation method of keeping allies happy, and raise yourself up groups of each main archetype sorrounded by your colonies, just by colonizing everything, keeping them from expanding, and slowly removing nearby colonies near their worlds to allow them to get stronger.

And again, since the grox only seem to attack colonies nearest to them, you could actually just disown everything closer to the core other than your homeworld, and have almost no risk of losing anything due to being attacked. You cannot lose your homeworld, and it will always end up with crappy spice production. You can just ignore the attacks.

Hmm, I can see that but since we don't have an actual method of relocating colonies I don't want to just treat them like the pixels they are, I try for a little bit of immersion.

I'm not making a great deal of colonies as I get closer to the centre and most of those I have are close to allies now too. I shall see how it gets once the Grox change from simply following my ship around to being nastier. heh.

Cheers.