Yes, a deficit spending on new colonies is something to avoid, at least in the early game. When you have a large, strong economy, you can afford it, but generally you should not build many (any) improvments on a colony until its population is high enough to start providing a decent tax income.

Re colony ships, you should put as many people aboard as their design permits (at higher tech levels, you can put two colony modules in a design and move half a million instead of a quarter million folks). If a world already has a colony, putting another colony ship in orbit is basically a population shuttle, as you observed. You only 'lose' the ship when you found a new colony.

You could always look at the .xml files themselves. You can find them here (or similiar location if you installed them elsewhere):

C:\Program Files\Stardock Games\GalCiv2\Data\English
C:\Program Files\Stardock Games\GalCiv2\DarkAvatar\Data\English
C:\Program Files\Stardock Games\GalCiv2\Twilight\Data\English

Everything there should be everything you need to know to play this game. You just need notepad and some patience to look at the files.

Also, if you are playing TA, you could always use the editors to look at those files. Its an easier read than notepad. The editors work for TA, and can be found here:

C:\Program Files\Stardock Games\GalCiv2\Twilight\Tools

There might be other stuff to use, but I can't think of them at the moment.

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Note: I think the Impulse install locations have changed since I installed GalCiv2, so you might expect things to be moved around a little. You might find GalCiv 2 in the "Program Files" folder instead of the "Stardock Games" folder.

In the Civilization Manager (the fullscreen colonies list), income is one of the columns and deficit colonies are listed in red.

When you're in a Colony window, selecting a buildable tile and an improvement will display info about the improvement, including its cost. If you're looking ahead and don't want to do the manual XML-digging that DivineWrath describes, you can use the free Galactopedia tool (if you're not running Vista, you'll need to have .NET installed).

I run a deficit-driven colony rush too, but that seemed to me like a distraction from allthumbs' basic questions. Especially because I put most of my deficit spending into building and supporting an expansion fleet and getting as many colonies going as I can before I start having to think about other things.

The basic colony maintainenance cost is the same as a couple-few improvements on most tech trees, and I prefer to have more early colonies with lower production than fewer colonies that can spend my limited BC faster.