simple teraforming question

[Snowflake]

Terrain rainy, rocky, river
is that 0 2 1? Why the computer gives me 0 1 1? what improvement can you do? Mine? Which will give you 0 2 1 pre tech?

[Flare]

Road & mine it to get 0-4-1. If you do not have the required tech, the mineral limit will only be 2. also Free Market will add 1 energy. So will the Merchant Exchange.

[Snowflake]

Can you find a table or something similar anywhere that lists the effect of all improvements on all kinds of terrain? I'm still puzzled why rainy, rocky and river only gives you 1 mineral pre terraforming. I'm really new (only finished a couple of games each on the citizen and specialist level) so I'm still testing out different things in the first 20 or 30 years.

[BustaMike]

Flatten the square and make it rainy, rolling, river. Now you have a nice square for a farm + solar. Takes a little more time, but it's great for growth and energy.

[BustaMike]

Oh, and it's only 1 mineral because all rocky and rolling squares give 1 mineral w/o any terraforming.

[Lazerus]

yep 0-1-1 says so in the manual

wouldn't recommend flattening it, rocky terrain is useful for sticking a mine on it and then crawling the 4 minerals, im sure theres some other flat part of the river that can be used for nutrients if you need them.

[Snowflake]

Ok. Now if I'm going to build a mine I guess I should build a road first to get the full benefit. However the river makes it slower to build the road. Plus the road doesn't give you any more benefit in movement because you already have a river. So does that mean this square is not a first choice for teraforming in the earlies game?

[Flubber]

Rivers are generally choice squares for early terraforming. I will forest all my (non-rocky)moist and arid squares on rivers to get 1-2-2 early on and then move to mines and farms and condensors later. To me, mines and farm/condensor combinations are designed for using crawlers.

Oh and a comment on roading a river square- While you can move 3 squares along the river without a road, this is little help if trying to cross the river ( unless the river tile leads to another river tile in all directions). So many river squares do gain some mobility benefit from having a road on them. generally I try to plan my roads to cross my mined rocky squares to gain both mobility and resource benefits

[BustaMike]

Lazerus, I would recommend flattening it because you can potentially get waaaaay more out of the square. A mine and road will get you 0-4-1 (or 0-2-1 with restrictions), whereas just flattening it will get you 2-1-1 and probably more like 4-1-5 or better with farms/solar etc. depending on restrictions.

It's also really easy to just crawler minerals out of mine squares elsewhere. I prefer to build mines on arid or moist rocky squares and use the rainy ones for better things.

[Flubber]

While I can agree with what Bustamike is saying, I find I rarely flatten squares. Perhaps I like crawled resources too much but my terraforming generally has some worked boreholes, forests with an occasional farmed/solar. Mines and farmed/condensors are crawled and the idea is that a lot of the citizens are specialists for the benefits and easy drone control

Early game, I find I don't want to waste my formers doing anything other than improvements from which I benefit quickly. Later, I would be putting boreholes anywhere they fit.

Generally, I find that I value a rainy square less once I get out of the early game. With the ease of pop-booming and the hab limits, it seems that I very quickly have more nutrients than bases can use.

[CEO Aaron]

Flubber is utterly correct. Using advanced terraforming techniques, you'll be using crawlers to ferry in nutrients from condenser farms, and building boreholes as tightly as you can pack them, with forests everywhere in between. This scheme makes (frequently unpredictable) rainfall a non-factor in the growth of your empire.

In my early days of playing, I would constantly get irritated when the AI factions would alter rainfall patterns, turning my verdant valleys into arid wastelands, now I just systematically extort planet for the resources I need.

[gwillybj]

Build Road First

Remember the number of turns required for road-building is variable, depending on underlying terrain and previous improvement. So, whatever else you intend to do in a square, if you want a road in it, do that first. Otherwise, your Former will require one extra turn to cut the road through the other improvement(s).
I stopped using the hotkeys for Farm+Solar+Road {Ctrl+Shift+S} and Farm+Mine+Road {Ctrl+Shift+M} a long time ago when I noticed the difference. Using those hotkeys makes the Former perform the actions in the order shown: Farm first, Mine or Solar next, Road last.
Road last = extra turn.

[Adalbertus]

I tend to stick to a very rigid terraforming pattern (resulting in a dense borehole packing), and then it seems most useful to me to flatten rocky terrain of any sort, except where I build boreholes. I'll build condensors and farms to get +4 nutrients (eventually +6) and crawl them. The freed workforce becomes specialists. And also in the mid-late game when I have time to create an energy/nuts/mine park, I've enough former time to make boreholes when I need mins. Anyway, usually I get two boreholes/base which seems to be enough minerals for most purposes. Most things per square you get with boreholes, and for crawled squares I need to max out one resource.

[Snowflake]

Thanks for all the replies! Looks like the options are: Flatten, farm and solar; Road and Mine; Forest. Hmmm... Sounds to me these are all the options there are for the early game. But thanks for all the valuable insights!

Again anybody knows a chart or something that lists the outcome of terrain plus improvements?

[Adalbertus]

I've compiled (=tested) a list for nutrients only, but including nutrient specials, the Monsoon Jungle and their combination. You can find this in the FAQ thread.
In the game manual, you can find how to calculate the productivity, but in the case of Soil Enricher and Condensors it's not correct.

For the early game, you should keep in mind that a special resource lifts the specific limitation for the given resource in that tile. In the early game, you don't get a benefit of Road-Mine on rocky terrain, it's 0-2-0 (unless you've got a mineral special which gives 0-6-0 or 0-7-0), as opposed to Flatten-Forest, which gives 1-2-1. Before flattening, you should consider if you really want it because flattening is irreversible. And you can plant forest on any tile. I'd rather remove fungus first.