just curious

I know ya gotta increase scan to find more planets,
the more planets you've scanned the lesser the odds of finding more.

but it's the quality of planets that are at question...

will having more open slots (meaning you can colonize 4-5 planets) rather than colonizing a planet every 4 ranks

Are the odds of a quality planet better if you had 4-5 open slots?

nope. i still cant find much worthwhile. in fact, the better your scanners, the fewer 'good' planets you can find. with low rank scanners, you find plenty of wonderful unoccupied planets. thats why so many people that have multis have dysons. then you have the high ranking scanners that find EVERYTHING. its good if youre nice and powerful, but most good planets ive found were from people in the top 10, and im a long way from the leaderboard. now im just waiting for a war to come up so i can sell em. scan with crappy scanners, and youll find better planet. and of course, its all 'random'.

90% is garbage. But since AP is scarce, a good terra or ocean could be acceptable. But if you NPC a lot with a large energy bar with drannik, etc, you start to think of what's most efficient to upgrade. In the long run, you want v.large Toxics only for mining (really any richness, if you can't find many), and v.massive Gas planets for research (rich is highest natural value I've seen) and artifacts (start with very sparse research to maximize AP upgrades from terraformers), gas can also be colossal with plasma which is the main reason for doing this.

Yeah, that's exactly what happens. The best planets I've scanned were two Very Large 3x Artifacts Terras, so I gave up on scanning good planets and focus on making them. The only mineral planets I take are Very Large Toxics, even if their mining isn't good, because it doesn't take long to maximize it (I also try to wait until I can put an Assimilation Locus on them). I don't take many research planets now, though, as I think I'm well enough off with that for now; I just focus on upgrading the Very Massives I have (I have two Very Massive 15x Gas planets, which are pretty productive). I use Terraformers on my Colossal planets, the first was for artifacts, the second is for mining; from now on they'll mostly all be for artifacts with the exception of any Colossal Plasmas I make. So yeah, you can try to do a ton of scanning and hope you get lucky, or you can fight NPSs and make your own good planets (and still hope you get lucky on the occasions you do scan for planets, of course).

With the lab techs, 15x colossal can be leveraged more with cloak. Resonance Inhibitor x2 = 1000 cloak for 2 space. Then add some regular cloaks until protected. Then there are several like the data warehouse or the satellites that are really nice and space efficient. Yeah, I cataloged the max planet size and quality in the wiki also (naturally occurring). v.large 3x arti is basically the max, don't count on finding it often.

I haven't tracked the exact numbers, but it seems like I find better planets when my odds of successfully scanning are low (like into the 40% or less range). It obviously burns more energy, but I always scan until my odds are depleted into the low 20s. I think most of my planets in the 1X+ range were scanned in those conditions. Never scanned anything above a 5X, and that one was enemy owned. I have a theory that anything above Ultra Rich has been artificially enriched.

Terras come up to 3x mega rich naturally, but most planet types stop at v.rich or ext.rich. The chance to get good stuff as far as I can tell is the same no matter what your chance to find.

Does anyone how good oceans get naturally? they should be classed as uncommon cuase i have like 50 oceans in my database.

I wanna say the best is Very Large and Extremely Rich, but it's really hard to tell these days.

Yea lolol

I observed and cataloged them based on over 5000 planets seen. So statistically I should have seen the best size and richness for all types; it's documented in http://galaxylegion.com/wiki/index.php/Planets , for most basic planet types. To answer your question about oceans, max observed natural: Massive / Artifact or Research: Extremely Rich