what is everyone's opinion about making the reverse terraforming, which is currently bound to "continium sculpter", a seperate trait?

I was wonderering about this because I want to use it with a custom faction but I don't want to use the "continium sculpers" faction trait, and seeing how the devs have split certain traits before like the "utopian infrastructure" trait that the vodyani get, I was wondering why not?

Yeah, good idea. I'm always in favor of more customization freedom. 

It always struck me as odd it wasn't connected to the Sterile Approval trait. (Which itself still needs some fixing last I checked.)

I agree that the "reverse terraforming" does not need to be tied to the Riftborn affinity. For creating custom factions it would be nice to get continuum sculptors who are comfortable on fertile planets, or any other affinity comfortable on sterile planets and terraforming towards them.

I would like to see more flexibility in terraforming in general. It doesn't seem reasonable to me that civilizations with such high tech can terraform to Terran but can't Terraform to Sterile. I mean, we are pretty low tech and it only took a hundred years for us to accidentally terraform to Toxic.

if I heard correctly the biggest reason that terraforming only goes in one direction was for player visibility, and in order to make it understandable for new players.

Lorco wrote:

if I heard correctly the biggest reason that terraforming only goes in one direction was for player visibility, and in order to make it understandable for new players.

They could just have two buttons. One for Terraforming and one for Reverse Terraforming.

except that this would still be "confusion" for newer players, since the conserne that the devs mentioned is that someone might just infinitly repaet the same two terraforming project without understanding what is happening,

personnally I like the idea of having to chosse between two styles namely sterile and fertile simply because it allows for more diverse empires, instead of allow every single empire the exact same options.

Lorco wrote:

except that this would still be "confusion" for newer players, since the conserne that the devs mentioned is that someone might just infinitly repaet the same two terraforming project without understanding what is happening,

personnally I like the idea of having to chosse between two styles namely sterile and fertile simply because it allows for more diverse empires, instead of allow every single empire the exact same options.

That could be very easily addressed if the game would include a terraforming graph.

It would be a lot better to be able to terraform from any to any planet. Could be a separate tech that would allow for it but sometimes it could be beneficial to go from Arid to Desert to get the Sterile bonus instead of going for a Fertile Jungle.

I've started an idea thread in the past about the faction creation system, inspired by this exact situation.  Some faction affinities just don't make sense and simply do not function properly when combined with some other affinities.  Reverse terraforming was one in particular that irked me when I tried to make a Riftborn-gene hunter faction.  didn't work as well as I'd hoped, obviously.

As for the confusion besetting new players about functions like this?  That's on the UI team to make something that better conveys critical information in a sea of 4x data--something else the team still seems to need a bit of guidance with.