It has already been established that we will not be seeing any superweapons in the form Death Stars and the like. I would however propose a weapon that is able to terraform a planet, so that you still feel very powerful and can use it tactically, but your opponent would be able to rebuild as opposed to being left with an asteroid field!



The idea would be that you would need to have at least two techs researched. The first would be an appropriate Terraforming tech, known as Transformations in-game. The other would be a high level military tech that would grant you the Weaponised Terraformer module. This module would only be available to be placed in the largest class of ships, those that require 4 command points. The tonnage of this ship would be so great that you could not effectively turn it into a battleship at the same time, while the cost to Industry of the single module should be so large that you could not easily mass produce it.



The idea, once constructed, would be to have your ship in an enemy system that you were at war with. Like with Invasions there can be no enemy fleets nearby for it to be used and once used the module cannot be used again. (Either the ship gets destroyed or there needs to be an expensive Restock button when around a friendly system) Due to the very high cost of production and quick loss of a useful ship hopefully this will reduce the chance of this idea being abused.



The result of activating the Terraforming module would be that you may pick an enemy planet, similar to when you are picking a planet to colonize, and then that planet is Terraformed to the same type as you have in your module. For example you are in a system with 2 Terran worlds and an Ocean world, your module contains a lava transformation and you click on one of the Terran planets. The result is that the system now contains 1 Terran world, 1 Ocean world and 1 Lava world.



Tactically this would allow you to send your scouts out to enemy systems and try to identify if the enemy using specific systems for certain things. An example would be that they have Terraformed all 5 planets of one system to become Lava worlds and as a result this system is their primary shipyards. Once identified you could prepare several of these Terraforming ships to take into enemy territory, which would not be cheap, but you would specialise the planet type they contained to do as much damage to the enemy industry as possible. As a result of the ships having little in terms of defense and offense you would also have to spare a fleet or two for protection. When your ships arrive you turn all of their planets into a planet type that does not get a great industry bonus, either naturally or through planetary exploitation.



These modules could add a great deal of variety to the end-game and offer unique strategic options to those willing to pursue the research costs and then after that the Industry costs. Hopefully these costs would prevent them from being misused, while still providing a powerful tool for those who know how to use it correctly. It may be necessary that once a planet has been Terraformed in this way it cannot be turned back for a set number of turns, to prevent the enemy from simply changing everything back in a few turns, but I believe the general idea is a very powerful one that wouldn't require too many changes to the game as it is to implement.



Please open up with your thought on the idea, with any possible changes and improvements.

That is actually a great idea. Reminds me a bit of Spore (yes, I played that ), where you could terraform planets with hot/cold-rays to change the temperature to habitable levels or, if on an enemy planet, to an uninhabitable level.

This has already been suggested and a summary list of improvement is listed here. If you feel certain ideas not rasied or have fresh ideas then please refer to this discussion thread

@jetkar



I'm assuming you're referring to: Doomsday Weapons - Specialised wespon Tech of mass destruction of both system and empire (If not please let me know)



I agree that this would fall under that category, but this suggestion is specifically not designed to be a Doomsday weapon. It is in fact designed with the exact opposite in mind of not being a game ender, but an extra form of strategy. I don't want to be able to just blow up planets and this is my solution to that while still allowing us powerful endgame weapons.

Maclardal wrote:
@jetkar



I'm assuming you're referring to: Doomsday Weapons - Specialised wespon Tech of mass destruction of both system and empire (If not please let me know)



I agree that this would fall under that category, but this suggestion is specifically not designed to be a Doomsday weapon. It is in fact designed with the exact opposite in mind of not being a game ender, but an extra form of strategy. I don't want to be able to just blow up planets and this is my solution to that while still allowing us powerful endgame weapons.

I did mean that but understand what you getting at. This will be added as a Tech.

I don't like the idea of a "weaponized terraformer" because terraforming should be a slow process which makes it impossible to use it as a weapon.