Terraforming.

[Bob Morane]

Originally posted by Darius
You can't make sweeping generalizations like this. Rainy tiles are quite rare, and on an arid world almost nonexistent. Likewise, you may have a low-elevation continent to deal with. Does that mean you should not build farms or solar collectors? No. You have to work with what you are given and make compromises.
Darius

Looks like i played too many games with dense cloud cover lately
You're right of course. I was not very clear that day. Yes i do build farms and solars on non optimal tiles quite often. In fact i build the farm-solar combination on any tile that is suitable either for farms or solars. Also, the forest everywhere technique i use often is efficient only if u have the prereq tech for tree farms (better with hybrid forests), but i usually try to rush for those techs if i'm not in war.
However, one terraforming i really find quite useless is the mine. Really, mines should be built only on rocky squares, as they would otherwise give u only 2 minerals (on rolling), which is the production of forests. And forests give u food and energy. Plus if u really want lots of minerals, put a few boreholes, they will give u plenty of energy too.

[Blake]

Something else concerning order, pre cent.psi you can build a bunker than plant fungus on the bunker, and you get a bunker with fungus under it. This has a couple of benefits: +50% defense vs air. Quick heal for native units. You also give attacking natives +50% attack though. Defense vs air a rocky tile is just as good as a fungus tile.

Another nice thing to do is plant fungus on your boreholes, this makes it impossible for fungus to 'pop' on the borehole (fungus towers can 'pop' up where military units are stationed), and gives +50% defense for units defending the borehole - fungus boreholes make great stations for worms. Note that boreholes work on fungus, unlike every other 'productive' terraforming.

[Purple]

Speaking of boreholes, I've noticed that an earthquake near a borehole changed the appearance of the borehole on the quake side. I assumed this indicated damage, but I didn't check to see if the production had changed. Does anyone know? Raising the land nearby would probably have the same effect.

[Blake]

Ah, raising land and boreholes, that introduces a few more fascinating borehole facts:

If you lower any tiles once you can then build a borehole on it. This is because tiles can never be more than one elevation higher than neighbours, so once it has been lowered it must be the same height or lower than all neighbouring tiles. This works really really well, and I've used it to pave my territory with boreholes, even pre-planning city sites so to be able to fit a maximum density of boreholes. Mind you, I dont do this anymore!

Raising terrain will never destroy boreholes, so after lowering and drilling a square of 4 boreholes raise the tile at the centre of the four boreholes to 3000+, and you can have well elevated land covered with boreholes, this has obvious merits if you want to drown the world with Ecodamage

If you have to lower every borehole square, and raise the centre of every 4 boreholes from <999 to 3000+ it only costs twice that of the boreholes themselves. The terraforming cost of raising/lowering terrain is trivial for the WP faction, or once you have Clean / Super.

In land scarse challenges such as UBC (or when double blind research) grabbing the WP and raising terrain so you can expand is a very solid strategy. This can be done very early in the game too. Finally, if your troops get sea sick, just get your formers to raise a landbridge to the enemy territory, large scale raises such as that tend to be a bit tedious before super reactors and magtubes, especially when raising a land bridge halfway around the world, which I once did.