What is your most Effective Colony choice?

Expansive: You get more colony hexes and more claims than any other colony type, which you'll need to secure the water that will provide all your necessities. Buildings cost 50% less Steel, which reduces your need for Iron compared to the others (except Scavenger). Use your gigantic footprint to grab either multiple water deposits or aluminum/silicon that can trickle in just fast enough to match your growth rate.

Robotic: You won't need a lot of infrastructure since Food/Water aren't essentials, but you'll need to get your Power generation up early and your flexibility is reduced. Later on, smelting Glass and synthesizing Chemicals will require Fuel/Oxygen, so you may end up having to buy those directly on the market or resort to building Electrolytic Reactors and buying water to set that up. Your small footprint means you get less trickle rate, but you do get a small improvement on trickle rate than other colonies do for the same coverage. Pick this if water is scarce, and try to place on top of Iron deposits or near to them.

Scavenger: If the map has abundant Carbon or in small coverable patches, think of going Scav. Your dependence on Carbon will make Chemicals incredibly expensive since you'll be drawing from that well more than others would. Your lack of dependence on Steel gives you a flexibility to speculate on it, buying it cheap and then selling when the inevitable crunch appears.

Scientific: You aren't affected by the size of deposits, can go straight to Steel, Food, Fuel/Oxygen, Chemicals, etc. Depending on placement you might be in increased need for Fuel to blimp your manufactureables home, but you will be spared the expense of raw material extraction (or purchase). You'll still need a Water Pump/Ice Condenser to provide your drinkable water, but otherwise raw materials become your speculation market.

In general, you should watch what colonies your opponents make, and realize what "wells" they'll be dipping into the most, and get into those markets early so you can be in control of them.

I just played a long game against a scientific colony and I think they won with patents? They weren't manufacturing anything but food, oxygen, and fuel. They were mining all of the silicon and carbon. I knew I was going to lose because their stock-value was ticking up slower than mine for a long time, but it was hard to tell what they were making money on. Maybe they were just selling carbon and silicon. Anyway, once they won I clicked on them and they had around 10 patents. That made me wonder if you can win by manufacturing patents.