Hey there.

I think it would be cool if, late in the game, you unlocked terraforming options that let you create planet types that don't naturally occur. It would mostly be a fluff thing (+more resources, depending on planet type), but I think it would make your empire feel a lot more advanced.

So I was thinking of 4 planets (one for each resource):

Garden World: Extensive soil manipulation and ecological engineering have resulted in a planet where the crop yield is maximized almost to the square inch.

Quarry planet: Vast sections of this planet's surface have simply been removed to make way for the immense mining platforms and processing rigs that cover most of its landmass

Planet-state: The planet's surface has been covered entirely in one undifferentiated city (think Coruscant)

Planetary Supercomputer: Most of this planet's surface has been cleared to make way for mile after mile of server banks, processors, power stations, and cooling tanks.

Your ideas sounds more like advanced forms of planetary exploitation than terraforming to be honest, not that this make the ideas any less interesting of course. :3 The planet-state idea could be an exploitation that over time develops new population caps for the planet for example.



However, the idea of manipulating planets in more advanced ways have crossed my mind as well. To be specific: planet ships (planets converted into mother ships) and transfer of planets between star systems (at extreme resource cost).



These ideas crossed my mind when reading the list of ideas for the coming expansion that touts star and planetary destruction as possible features. At first this struck me as very wasteful. Misunderstand me right however, as having planet busters, nova bombs, singularity weapons or whatever else they come up with to achieve that feat could introduce some new epic space situations, especially if it cut off movement paths (making the tech to ignore those paths even more essential). But it's not very beneficial or true to the play style of good factions which should have alternative ways to strip star systems IMO. Being able to transform, convert and move planets struck me as a more true way for a good faction to "eliminate" star systems.

Not a bad idea certainly.

But yeah, it does sound like the planetary exploitations.

Hmmm... This could be possible, though the problem with adding any new terraforming states is it sort of begs the addition of graphics to go along with them. That aside, this actually could be done much easier (in terms of game mechanics, anyway) as terraforming options as opposed to exploitations.



What I'm curious about is if it may be possible to have exploitations that require a specific planetary state in order to become available (and if the exploitations themselves could change the planet graphic). If that's the case, then you could achieve these "super-specialized" planets in two phases: a long/expensive terraforming phase followed by an exploitation phase. To make it interesting, you could fix it so that the specialized terraformed state is nearly useless without the exploitation.