XC – Tile Terraforming For Stellaris

XC – Tile Terraforming For Stellaris

Adds the ability to increase planet size (add tiles) after researching terraforming. You can now fill your space with full 25 size planets! This is done using a building that automatically increases planet size over time.

NOW FULLY AUTOMATED!!

My reasoning for this mod is that once you have the ability to fully terraform a planet, adding a little “Bulk” to a planet shouldn’t be that big of a deal. I have tried to keep the cost in line with the cost of terraforming as much as possible, using the following calculations:

The “Tile Terraformer” building will now automatically increase a planets size. The formula it uses to calculate how long it takes to add a tile is (Current Planet Size x 27 Days).

For Example the Size 16 Starting planet will take:

1 Year to build the building, granting 1 tile upon buliding completion
+432 Days until the next tile (16 x 27)
+459 Days until the next tile (17 x 27)
so on and so forth until
648 Days to build the last tile, at which point the Building will “time out” and remove itself from the planet.

Maintenance costs for the building:
10 Energy/mo
20 Minerals/mo
1 Terraforming Gas
1 Terraforming Liquid

This works out to roughly
432 Minerals and 216 Energy for the LAST TILE added to a planet, which is about 44% more expensive then my previous version that used a flat cost for all tiles.

This may seem low and unbalanced, but when you calculate that building a colony ship takes 1 year, and costs 350 minerals, and can net you 8 to 25 tiles on a “new” planet; the cost of adding ONE tile to a planet starts to seem a little more balanced.

How this change will impact your game:

1. Once you have unlocked Terraforming, you can start to “Build Tall” your already existing planets, givnig you more strategic optoins.

2. AI will take advantage of this, expect any AI that has this tech to start building better planets.

3. An overall more “Strategic” feel to expansion. No longer are you forced to colonize every planet you come across, now you can expand within your borders.

Compatability:

This mod should be compatible with everything as no core files were changed.

What I STILL want to do:

I wanted to make a custom “Constuction” ship that would “Terraform” a planet from orbit, slowly, over time. I also wanted to make the cost and time needed to be adjusted automatically based on current planet size. However, due to limitations of the modding tools, this wasn’t possible at this time.

Any feedback is welcome.

I am generally happy with the balance of this now, it might need a little tweaking here and there, but for the most part I think it has a good point of entry requirement and has the resource cost at a good level.