the Tech that enables the terraforming of Gas Giants(into each other) also enables terraforming them into Tier 4 Planets and vice versa.



I'd assume that it would be ... possible to ... somehow bind the Gasses in solid matter, as in letting them react to a solid or liquid sort of stuff. Don't know how you'd acchieve that with Helium* but I'd bet there are plenty of things that can bind Hydrogen^^. It's all dependent on temperature tho.



Asteroids not being terraformable probably is to avoid them being Terraformed all the time, because frankly they suck





* cascade Fusion anyone?^^

Antera wrote:
I'm sure somebody will come up with a new black magic to deal with the mass problem if the dev really wants to add asteroid terraforming

You could make a hollow sphere out of the asteroid material and let it spin at high speeds, letting the residents live on the inside of the shell, giving you pseudogravity in the process.



Still costly and definitely not a normal type of planet.

I'm sure somebody will come up with a new black magic to deal with the mass problem if the dev really wants to add asteroid terraforming

The main problem is mass. A normal asteroid girdle has only fractions of the total mass of a planet (our asteroid belt has e.g. only 10^21 kg of mass and e.g. earth has about 10^24 kg of mass, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#Characteristics ) and building planets from scratch... You can read some of the problems, here: /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/12896-suggestion-building-planets



Gas giants have too much mass, if anything, so the problem is rather to get rid of enough of it and expose a rocky core if there is any, but at least there's plenty of matter building material to start with. And as far as I'm aware you can only terraform gas giants to other types of gas giants in ES, which is rather strange, too.

There is no tech to terraform asteroid in stock game.



No idea what the logic is, maybe they want to put it in in a future dlc? (ES did not have gas giant terraforming until the free dlc automaton was released)

Asteroids cannot be terraformed.



As for the logic behind it, or the balance decisions that were made, I don't know.