Idyllic Bloom guarantees Gas by day 1 with Inorganic Breath or using second species with Gaseous Byproducts. Still mediocre. You take an unremovable civic for 100% habitability and +13.6% yields after investing a fortune of energy and gas per planet, or you simply take Meritocracy and enjoy +10% specialist output unconditionally.
It's very much playable and is rich for RP, but it's not that good, at least not in my book, even if you minmax for it. And if market unlock gimmick were to be fixed it'd go straight into the garbage bin, because a starter civic that does almost nothing for the first 20-30 years is just haha, nope.
Terraforming a planet to a friendly climate costs 5k energy.
Terraforming a planet to a Gaia World costs 7.5k energy.
On paper, Gaia Seeders look more expensive than that, sure. If we assume the base construction time of 16 months per phase and going immediately from phase to phase with Gaia Seeders, you'll expend 6,960 Energy and 398 Gas for the full terraforming project, which would be 12,134 Energy only if you pay market rate for literally all the gas used in the building of the Gaia Seeders.
The rub is that 1) Gas is the least useful strategic resource. One Gas Mining building produces enough gas to employ 18 Researchers in fully-upgraded buildings. We're really giving it outsized weight in this calculation, there will 100% be extra gas in the empire not being used for any other purpose to invest into Gaia Seeders and 2) the costs of Gaia Seeders is building construction and upkeep, which will get reduced by all kinds of different effects including, but not limited to, the Architectural Sense leader trait, Architectural Interest governor trait, the Prosperity tradition, and the Functional Architecture civic. Furthermore, for 75% of the time that the terraforming project is happening you're getting a 10% pop growth boost on the planet, and even with the penalties to building upkeep on inhospitable worlds, construction speed bonuses like from Assembly Patterns will significantly reduce the ability of those penalties to impact the overall price.
This also assumes you use the base buildings and not the holdings, which is important because the holdings are HILARIOUSLY cheap and amazing to spam on your vassals while preparing to absorb them.
As for using racial traits to get access to gas, Inorganic Breath and Gaseous Byproducts are both two-point traits that just give you access to gas with stiff drawbacks. Inorganic Breath increases your pop's CG upkeep from living conditions by 50%, which is *a lot*, and Gaseous Byproducts requires you to play Lithoid with all the challenges that entails. Life Seeded doesn't just give you those two trait points back for your primary species *and* give you access to Gas at the start of the game, it also gives you access to Crystals at the start of the game, which is required to research Hyperlane tech, and gives you a size 30 homeworld with an additional production bonus, giving you plenty of room to grow your empire until you can research Terraforming and Ecological Adaptation as well as a great world to transform into an Ecumenopolis and continue scaling into the late-game at a later time.
Sure, it's not a meta online PvP build because you can't, immediately after game start, colonize a second world, designate it a Forge World, and then spam out alloys while resettling all your pops to it, but the origin has a really solid and easy starting playline that leads into being a galactic power.
