I think a better mod to make farm/solar more appealing is to switch the tech requirements of Paradise Garden and Hybrid Forest. This way you can't get the 3/2/2 from Forest so early (7 FOP is quite good, only surpassed by farm/solar with a lot of raising and echelons). Tree farm is okay about when you get it (2/2/1), and really Forest isn't overpowering early at 4 FOP (farm/solar gets around 4-5 FOP typically early). May play around with making raising/lowering slow, and level/echelons fast. Therefore making Forest and Farm/Solar closer in the time between Super and Hybrid Forest.
Yea, I prefer to keep the tech tree in the default order, but that could work too. I haven't found that enrichers really have much impact (N are in excess by this point).
I may need to re-evaluate specialist strategies, but my gut tells me they aren't that good unless you have no pacts at all?
I do agree Condensors are probably powerful enough even at 0 N, something I'll try with this.
Solar+Condensor on the same tile probably isn't needed even to make solar good. I think doing so might take out some of the choice (every tile gets condensor then and enricher is redundant in function).
Solars are pretty strong when you start stacking echelons.
Might be hard to represent Solar+Condensor in the same tile graphically anyways?
I think one of the most underrated terraforming is sea, actually.
Being able to break out former times for land vs sea (i.e. farm/kelp differing, and solar/tidal differing), would be helpful too.
Yea, the fact that sea forming is cheap on FTs is somewhat balanced with higher former costs.
It's only with a lot of echelons and raising that solar surpasses 8 FOP.
Making booming harder how? Giving everyone -2 GROWTH on Futures tier, was my only good idea for that (which unfortunately makes Aki/Pirates unplayable, unless you change their penalties). It would make N-sats a lot more crucial. I play with just +1 GROWTH on Planned in my SE set, which arguably makes booming quite a bit harder (Demo+Planned was a lot easier than GA-based, at least for everyone but Yang/Morgan).
Actually Tidals take between 4 FT and 8 (usually 4). Something I have to look into, seems like an odd formula perhaps related to sea depth, surrounding tiles, maybe a few other factors.
Usually enrichers would be left to very last for farm/solar bases.Depends how important nutrients are...
Same with raising (raise every 3rd tile in a grid to 3k, such that the surrounding 8 tiles get 2k altitude for free).
An echelon will typically boost 3-4 solars
meaning it is about 3-4x as good as raising a single 2k altitude tile to 3k, since both cost 12 FTs (not to mention the energy cost of raising).
Another temporary workaround for GROWTH might be to put Creches later, swapping them with something else (if you don't like early booming).
Sure, see attached. Each of the 3 formers has a different time (at least for me, I see 4, 6, and 8 FT to make a Tidal with default terraforming settings)
Usually echelons will only touch 3-4 solars, if you are touching more than that it's more beneficial to replace a solar with an echelon.
Discounting altitude, an echelon makes 0E compared to a solar. So it's at roughly 50% echelons that you're optimized (usually a checkered grid, if bases are tightly packed).
Well going from 2k to 3k is only +1 E at that square for 12 FT.
Every third square might not have been the best descriptor. I meant more like, a wide spacing grid. So essentially it'd be one square out of every nine or so at 3k, on an infinite grid. Though this too can get messed up a bit if you have a base at a '3' location, since you can't raise on a base tile (I'm not sure why this is really). Something like this layout:
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232232232
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232232232
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