Colonization near home planet

[Peef]

From what Ive seen, the AI seems to colonize a lot of planets near their home planet, but for myself, my exploration ships took very long to find planets, and when they did, it was almost always pretty remote, giving me a hard time protecting everything..

Am I doing something wrong?

[Sirian]

Which race are you playing with? If it is a race that has a home planet other than contiental, the propability for a suitable planet could be smaller than with continental planets. In my last games I found continental planets tend to have higher quality than others. If you research other colonization tech (marshy swamp, continental if not known) you can increase the number of possible colonies usually resulting in getting more and better colonies near your home.

[feelotraveller]

In addition to researching colonisation technologies perhaps having more exploration ships might help you out.  I rarely have less than 20 even on harsh settings, and sometimes upwards of 50 on easier income games.  Taking manual control of them, at least in the early game, can increase exploration efficiency.  Generally most of my explorers are used for revealing the planets in the system and then jumping on without exploring for resources.  You will find colonisable planets more quickly this way.  I'll not jump outsystem immediately only if there are ruins to explore.  Best way to do this is to order your explorers to move to the system rather than to explore it.  Keep an eye on them and as soon as the system name is revealed give them additional orders.  I use a second class of explorers to conduct follow up surveys later on for resources.
 
Also consider invading/colonising independent races which can settle different types of worlds to your starting race.  This does take some time to come to fruition.
 
Beyond that it can be quite random.  Sometimes you are in the middle of a cluster of planets of your native type and sometimes they seem as rare as hen's teeth...

[Peef]

Thanks a lot for the replies, this will help a lot.

I was playing as humans, so that might explain the remote planets.

Also i had lots of exploration ships, but all on automation.. Gonna change that as well

[w1p]

like feelo says, manually control your starting exploration ships. The AI is woeful at this, often sending up to 5 (most i've ever seen) to explore the same system... I've never tried using the first wave to just scout systems and leave resources till later, I might try that in my next game. Good tip

[Peef]

do the exploration ships also look for ancient ships when you tell them to 'explore a vertain system' ?

or do they stop when they have visited all planets?