How much management your colony requires depends on the world it is on and your own goals and preferences. A well managed colony will grow much faster, provide you with more income and even increase your reputation. It is also beneficial to have specialized colonies for resources or ship production, and research.
Good management is something you learn over time and will always cost a lot of resources and credits.


- It is fine if your stats are in the yellow, green is for later in the game when tech has advanced enough for you to really improve those stats.

- Plutocracy is the safest option for government on early game colonies. Use Autocracy on mining colonies.

- Your urban colony can be stable and profitable with just 200-250 wages, 0% income tax (income tax is for later in the game), and 1-2% wealth tax.

- The Controlled Media local law currently (Beta 6) provides a lot of benefits for almost downsides on early game colonies.

- If your colony doesn't have any mines you should set your Environmental Regulations local law to Protective.

- Set your development indexes up so that you always have at least 100% tech index. 20/10/9/1 is a safe option for your main colony. For mining colonies use something like 3/8/20/1. For hyper urbanized colonies you can do 20/17/1/1.
(the fact that indexes it can add up to 400% is a relic from the game's ancient times, don't think too much about it)

- When building facilities and mines, keep an eye on the color coding of the quality. Bright Green is perfect. Dark Green is good but not perfect. Yellow is okay but not great. Red is bad. Dark Red is really bad. Grey/Colorless means it is so bad it won't do anything.

See also:Colony, Population, Happiness, Education, Health, Crime, Colony Size, Unemployment, Development Index, Taxes, Wage, Wealth, Government, Capital, Local Laws, Storage, Food, Habitability, Atmosphere