I am United Empire in a Serious difficulty game, sharing my half of the galaxy with the Cravers.

I'm about to launch a full-scale attack to wipe them out, but the problem is that they colonized a lot of pretty bad systems which I don't want because I need high approval to be able to run high taxes and Expansion Disapproval + Disapproval from bad planets is not going to let me do that.



The thing is I have no idea whether you can wipe out a colony, and I haven't found a way to abandon a colony of my own... and I can't leave them on these colonies because I'll probably need them at some point and if I left them there they would end up depleting them...



Is there anything else I could do?

Apart from letting pirates take the systems for you, there is nothing that you can do. You just have to take them, or leave them as there is no way at the moment to get rid of a colony.

I seem to recall the devs saying they're working on a way to get rid of planets and colonies but its not in the game yet.

InFlamesWeTrust wrote:
I seem to recall the devs saying they're working on a way to get rid of planets and colonies but its not in the game yet.

Please see jetkar's suggestion list and the thread it references for "things the dev team is tracking" to see this and many other popular suggestions.

They are going to implement "raze colonny"-ability later on but it might take a while so pirates are the only option now

Your best approach to dealing with unhappiness on captured systems is to have a lot of happiness buildings researched, at least up through information highways. When you capture a system, ctrl-click on all the useless AI buildings you don't want and scrap them; switch the system exploits to industry if they are food or finance; then queue all the happiness buildings. If possible, use the buyout button to get them built quicker.

Davea explained it thoroughly, closing this thread.