Tomb-ify uninhabited worlds?

[SeekingEtermity]

Stellaris has the very curious property that, via either Tomb World Habitability or the Survivor trait, it's possible for a species to have higher habitability on a blasted frozen hellscape than on a planet with a generally functional biosphere. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that you can terraform to Tomb World, and even if you could, terraforming tech takes a while to get and costs a lot.

On the other hand, a decent-sized fleet of even early-tech warships, operating in the "Armageddon" bombardment stance, can easily turn any inhabited planet into a Tomb World with no extra resource expenditure. It seems that it should be at least as easy to bombard an uninhabited planet into a Tomb World, but I don't see any way to it. Right-clicking on a habitable planet, or even selecting "Attack" and then left-clicking the planet, doesn't do it; the fleet moves there but doesn't open fire (even though it is set to Armageddon bombardment).

Is there any way to turn uninhabited planets into Tomb Worlds, aside from events like the Worm and occasional anomalies?

EDIT: Numerous people have expressed concern that this would let Post-Apoc empires send their fleets "spoiling" planets that other empires would eventually own but don't yet. While I think this risk is overblown, it could be countered by only letting you perform terraform-by-nuke on planets you already own.

 

[JodelDiplom]

Stellaris has the very curious property that, via either Tomb World Habitability or the Survivor trait, it's possible for a species to have higher habitability on a blasted frozen hellscape than on a planet with a generally functional biosphere. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that you can terraform to Tomb World, and even if you could, terraforming tech takes a while to get and costs a lot.

On the other hand, a decent-sized fleet of even early-tech warships, operating in the "Armageddon" bombardment stance, can easily turn any inhabited planet into a Tomb World with no extra resource expenditure. It seems that it should be at least as easy to bombard an uninhabited planet into a Tomb World, but I don't see any way to it. Right-clicking on a habitable planet, or even selecting "Attack" and then left-clicking the planet, doesn't do it; the fleet moves there but doesn't open fire (even though it is set to Armageddon bombardment).

Is there any way to turn uninhabited planets into Tomb Worlds, aside from events like the Worm and occasional anomalies?

Would that not make it altogether too easy for survivors to "spoil" all habitable planets around them and make them unusable for other civs?

 

[Playwars]

Stellaris has the very curious property that, via either Tomb World Habitability or the Survivor trait, it's possible for a species to have higher habitability on a blasted frozen hellscape than on a planet with a generally functional biosphere. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that you can terraform to Tomb World, and even if you could, terraforming tech takes a while to get and costs a lot.

On the other hand, a decent-sized fleet of even early-tech warships, operating in the "Armageddon" bombardment stance, can easily turn any inhabited planet into a Tomb World with no extra resource expenditure. It seems that it should be at least as easy to bombard an uninhabited planet into a Tomb World, but I don't see any way to it. Right-clicking on a habitable planet, or even selecting "Attack" and then left-clicking the planet, doesn't do it; the fleet moves there but doesn't open fire (even though it is set to Armageddon bombardment).

Is there any way to turn uninhabited planets into Tomb Worlds, aside from events like the Worm and occasional anomalies?

The survivor's advantage is the habitability bonus, letting them cheaply turn every world into a tomb world would be akin to giving life seeded the ability to terraform world into Gaia as soon as they get terraforming tech. Terraforming to Tomb World would be an interesting unique feature for the post apocalyptic civic however.

 

[Incompetent]

Tomb World habitability preference is amazing, it basically lets you live anywhere with minimal penalties. (The *base* is 60%, but you'll quickly boost that through tech and so on.) You have to consider though that it is far from exclusive to a particular empire type: in particular, the Horizon Signal is pretty much a rite of passage for non-Gestalt empires.

The Survivor trait (giving good habitability on Tomb Worlds themselves, but not on other planet types) is not all that great to be honest, unless you're a Fanatic Purifier. (Annihilating your enemies with Armageddon bombardment is fun, but let's be honest, even if you are a bad guy, there are usually more efficient ways to make use of conquered planets and their inhabitants.) Being able to terraform to Tomb World would be kind of pointless, because your species has even better habitability on their 'natural' biome (i.e. whatever your homeworld was before the disaster).

I don't think you should just be able to bomb neutral planets into tomb worlds with no questions asked - as JodelDiplom says, it'd be too easy to 'spoil' all the space around you. I don't think it would be overpowered though to be able to do this to empty planets in systems that you have already paid the influence to own, if it came at the cost of having to park a fleet there for a while and creating a bunch of 'bomb crater' blockers.

 

[SeekingEtermity]

Tomb World habitability preference is amazing, it basically lets you live anywhere with minimal penalties. (The *base* is 60%, but you'll quickly boost that through tech and so on.) You have to consider though that it is far from exclusive to a particular empire type: in particular, the Horizon Signal is pretty much a rite of passage for non-Gestalt empires.

The Survivor trait (giving good habitability on Tomb Worlds themselves, but not on other planet types) is not all that great to be honest, unless you're a Fanatic Purifier. (Annihilating your enemies with Armageddon bombardment is fun, but let's be honest, even if you are a bad guy, there are usually more efficient ways to make use of conquered planets and their inhabitants.) Being able to terraform to Tomb World would be kind of pointless, because your species has even better habitability on their 'natural' biome (i.e. whatever your homeworld was before the disaster).

I don't think you should just be able to bomb neutral planets into tomb worlds with no questions asked - as JodelDiplom says, it'd be too easy to 'spoil' all the space around you. I don't think it would be overpowered though to be able to do this to empty planets in systems that you have already paid the influence to own, if it came at the cost of having to park a fleet there for a while and creating a bunch of 'bomb crater' blockers.

I think the amount of time it takes is already a pretty good counter to the "spoiler" argument. A fleet that's out bombarding uninhabited worlds is one that's not at war for you (or preventing piracy, most likely). A planet inside another empire's space shouldn't be bombardable unless you're at war with them, so a not-at-war-with-you empire could stop the bombardment by building a starbase to occupy the system. Yes, you might manage to spoil some planets that your neighbors end up owning by getting your fleet there far enough in advance of their construction ship, but again, you're paying a price for sending a fleet (not even of trivial size, or you can't bombard) that far out from what are presumably your own borders.

The *WEIRD* thing is that if you *are* at war with somebody and have ships in their system, you can bomb the ecosphere of a planet they own into oblivion as soon as they colonize the planet, but not until then. As for "you should be only able to bomb-uninhabited-planet-to-tomb-world if you own the system"... mechanically this makes no sense, but gameplay-wise, as an additional anti-world-spoiling limitation, fine. Let's go with that.

Tomb World habitability is basically overpowered to hell and gone - or would be, if habitability mattered more - and frankly doesn't make a lot of sense; I'd expect even Horizon Signal to just give Survivor. On the other hand, Survivor is also pretty weird. I get that it wouldn't be useful to terraform to Tomb Worlds just for the sake of Survivor if you have some non-Tomb habitability preference - although I could see an argument for it, if it was faster/cheaper/available earlier - but it's bizarre as hell that you can be well-suited to living in teaming jungles or sweltering deserts, and also nearly as well-suited to living in bombed-out hellscapes in the midst of a nuclear winter, but totally garbage at living on planets that are merely very cold. Like, does bombarding an Arctic world with mass-drivers make it *warmer* somehow, or are you just very weak to its particular temperature range such that either hotter or colder conditions are fine?

I like the idea of bombarding a planet into a tomb world creating more blockers, whether or not it was inhabited.

EDIT: If you have both Survivor and Tomb World Habitability, you have a base habitability of 150% on tomb worlds. That means even if you also have Non-Adaptive and the planet has every habitability malus the devs have ever thought of, it'll still be quite cozy... quite possibly better than the 80% for a homeworld-type planet to a species without Non-Adaptive. Given that, being able to terraform (or bomb) a planet to Tomb World would actually be a *lot* better than just terraforming it to any normal planet type, at least as far as your species is concerned.

 

[SeekingEtermity]

The survivor's advantage is the habitability bonus, letting them cheaply turn every world into a tomb world would be akin to giving life seeded the ability to terraform world into Gaia as soon as they get terraforming tech. Terraforming to Tomb World would be an interesting unique feature for the post apocalyptic civic however.

Life-seeded gives you size 25, Gaia (which still has special bonuses beyond the habitability, I believe), and special deposits. The option to have your fleets "terraform" for you - at the cost of not being able to do things like fight in wars or suppress piracy for you at the same time, or even have their maintenance reduced by a starbase - is in no way equivalent to giving Life-Seeded the bonus you describe. Yes, it's still cheaper than normal terraforming, but the result is less useful than even just terraforming to your a standard original home-planet type (assuming you aren't also Tomb World habitability, which just stacks weirdly).

 

[01d55]

Tomb Worlds have a weak planetary feature set which causes them to have, on average, inferior district availability than other planet types of the same size. This consideration outweighs habitability, especially in the long term.

 

[beckermt]

Just as a heads-up, the tomb world biome preference from the Post-Apocalyptic civic is a bug. The species is supposed to get a normal biome habitability preference and +70% to Tomb Worlds. This makes tomb worlds better for them than everything except their selected biome, but only minimally. And given the general rarity of Tomb Worlds, the advantage is, once again, minimal.

The Tomb World Habitability trait is supposed to be rare, acquired via primitives, pre-sapients, or events.