From the no big deal, it's just a game, category

If you want to include the hundreds of moons, Titan is toxic and all the rest seem to be barren or ice.

In GCIII there are at least 4x as many toxic and radioactive (there is bound to be a radioactive planet somewhere in the galaxy) as there are water, ice and barren combined. If they mean cosmic rays when they say radioactive, all barren planets are also radioactive, I suppose, but somehow I think they mean radioactive in a different sense than cosmic rays.

Oh well, I am just feeling a bit put out about the abundance of high PQ toxic and radioactive that are "occasionally" popping up in my game. 

 

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I would be interested to know if the frequency of the extreme planets just happen to be what they are, or if they're related to the relative availability of races to have traits necessary to colonize them?

-tid242

If I were to guess, I would guess that the large number of initially uninhabitable planets that require tech research to be able to colonize them later in the game is a response to the many criticisms the devs have gotten about the initial planet rush typical during the early game period. They certainly took a pounding about it, and I think they came up with a neat solution, although the "realism" of the solution could certainly be questioned.

You are providing data from one solar system, ours.  What is the average of data compiled by astronomers?  Are toxic planets rarer than barren planets through most other solar systems as well?

Personally I think the far end extreme High quality toxic/radioactive planets should be rare or slightly below in appearance of the settings of what you set 'habitable' ones. I prefer settings where Habitable are 'uncommon' . I would like to see the extreme actually slightly more abundant thus giving us as players a reason to go down those lines. Lets face it, any rocky planet outside the Goldilocks area of its star will be either frozen or barren and unlikely to be a water/aquatic one. Mars is not toxic and is really just barren. 

All this boils down to player preference (as it should). I like large voids between clusters of stars. Some players like a smooth distribution of stars and planets in their galaxy. I would like a good start to get empire going then start looking for the 'extreme' ones to extend my credits or research base. 

Oh and the Extreme focus techs need more clear info regarding what I get for those techs. I want to see that Frozen Planets gives me a 15% bonus to research and full production. Also I want to unlock all of the extreme planets as a full production. I do not want a research penalty as described by Gilmoy for doing this one tech line. Others I can get but this seems to really force my hand on what planet I want to build.  

Well,

I guess what I was getting at was that if there are multiple extreme planet types, and the research required to colonize any of them is the same, then logically one would think that they should appear in equal amounts (so there's no reason to research, say radioactive worlds rather than barren worlds, unless you randomly happened to start at a location where there happened to be more radioactive worlds than barren worlds).

Otherwise, there will be some planet types that colonizing either would not happen, or would happen last.  Maybe this would be intentional, or maybe not.  But if this is intentional, I would be curious as to the specific reasoning behind this design decision.

Obviously some racial traits will allow for colonization of specific rare planet types, so this should enter into the frequency calculation, but aside from that, frequency/reason would be interesting to know...

-tid242