A lot of people have noted that the terraforming mechanic isn't super useful currently because by the time you can use it, you usually have alien races within your empire that can colonize such worlds directly. It's also limited in that you can only change the class of habitable worlds. True terraforming in the science fiction sense is all about taking uninhabitable worlds (like Mars) and transforming them into Earthlike ones. There's a mod adding this feature, but according to the thread, it has balance issues.
I'd like to solve both issues at once, and there's one simple way to do it: make terraforming harder. A lot harder.
The first way to make terraforming harder is through technology. Changing the class of habitable worlds is one type of terraforming, and it can either use the current technological setup or be split into multiple technologies (creating a greenhouse effect requires different research than creating a cooling effect, after all). Transforming a barren, frozen, molten, or toxic world is something entirely different, and they should each have their own (possibly rare) technology allowing that to happen. Discovering one of those early could be an interesting rare effect of the "abandoned terraforming equipment" event chain.
The second way to make terraforming harder is to increase the cost of building and maintaining terraforming stations. Depending on the type of terraforming, they may need to remain operational after the process is complete to keep the planet from reverting (which opens up interesting tactical options during wartime).
The most important way to make terraforming harder, however, is to make the resources needed to do it rare enough to fight over. If you think about it, getting a hold of "terraforming liquids" entails transporting an ocean's worth of water from one planet to another; "terraforming gases," an atmosphere's worth of CO2 or oxygen. This is not something to be taken lightly, and once you do it, it's done.
THEREFORE:
So what else could we do to fix terraforming, and how can these ideas be improved?
I'd like to solve both issues at once, and there's one simple way to do it: make terraforming harder. A lot harder.
The first way to make terraforming harder is through technology. Changing the class of habitable worlds is one type of terraforming, and it can either use the current technological setup or be split into multiple technologies (creating a greenhouse effect requires different research than creating a cooling effect, after all). Transforming a barren, frozen, molten, or toxic world is something entirely different, and they should each have their own (possibly rare) technology allowing that to happen. Discovering one of those early could be an interesting rare effect of the "abandoned terraforming equipment" event chain.
The second way to make terraforming harder is to increase the cost of building and maintaining terraforming stations. Depending on the type of terraforming, they may need to remain operational after the process is complete to keep the planet from reverting (which opens up interesting tactical options during wartime).
The most important way to make terraforming harder, however, is to make the resources needed to do it rare enough to fight over. If you think about it, getting a hold of "terraforming liquids" entails transporting an ocean's worth of water from one planet to another; "terraforming gases," an atmosphere's worth of CO2 or oxygen. This is not something to be taken lightly, and once you do it, it's done.
THEREFORE:
- Terraforming resources should not be automatically obtained by mining stations. Instead, these stations should have an action button (like other ships) that allows you to order it to harvest those materials for a significant cost in energy credits. Once the resource is mined, it disappears from the planet and goes into your empire's stockpile.
- You must then spend those resources in addition to more energy credits in order to terraform a planet. And once they're used, they're gone. If the process gets interrupted, you might not get any or all of those resources back. This will create scarcity, forcing players to choose between terraforming projects, possibly permanently. This will make terraforming liquids and gasses worth fighting over.
- The cost of terraforming, in both resources and energy, should depend on the type of terraforming being done, and that cost should be clear up front. For example, to turn an arctic world into a tundra world, you need to raise the temperature through a greenhouse effect, though not by too much. This might require one resource of terraforming gases. Making a barren planet continental, however, would require a lot more gas and a lot more water. It might cost two or three of each resource, in addition to a lot of energy.
- The cost of terraforming should scale to the size of the target planet. It takes a lot more gas and water to terraform a superearth-sized planet than a tiny moon. But the payoff is greater too; larger tiles will provide more space for pops to work.
- To keep the resources from getting too rare, there may be some instances in which terraforming actually produces terraforming gases or liquids. For example, if I'm changing an ocean world into a continental one, all that extra water has to go somewhere, so why not into the empire's stores? The limit on this would be that you would always get less out terraforming than you put in. So while savvy players might use this as a way to change what types of terraforming resources they have on hand, it will always come at a cost, increasing scarcity even more.
- Finally, mid-terraforming events (both good and bad) should be a lot more common. They may require players to sacrifice an extra terraforming resource or put in more energy credits. (In that way, it'll be similar to the canal projects in EU4.)
So what else could we do to fix terraforming, and how can these ideas be improved?
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