When I play with the Altarian tech tree as a custom faction, I get to use the Biosphere manipulator once on a Soil Engineering tile.  The text says multiple times, but I have never actually seen that happen.  Didn't even realize it was supposed to be more than once.

   I also get a "Universal Soil Adapter" from Habitat Improvement.

Q:  Still broken?

Problem solved:  Added the Ultra-Terraformer planetary improvement to Altarian Paradise Worlds tech.

How-To:

• Find and open your AltarianTechDefs.txt file, it is in GalcivIII / Data / Game directory
• Search the text file for "ParadiseWorlds"
• Edit the GenericName to be "EnvironmentalResequencing" instead of "ParadiseWorlds"
• Save the file
• Time to check our work!
• Launch Galciv3 and start a new game as Altarians
• Open debug console using ~ and then type in "unlock" and press enter to unlock all technologies
• Open your home planet, scroll through things to build, you should see the "Ultra-Terraformer" option and it should NOT be Colony-Unique
• Start a new game as Altarians
• Enjoy!

Instead of editing the file you should actually create a mod with the changes.

I looked at this first.  Two problems:

• Making it non-unique changes it for EVERYBODY, not just the Altarians
• It is much cheaper to construct the Biosphere than the Ultra-Terraformer, so you could terraform the crap out of your planet extremely easily

Last time I tried to create a mod it didn't work.  Admittedly that's a month or so ago, but this worked nicely for me.

You have it backwards. Biosphere Manipulator is an Altarian-unique improvement. Only they can build it, because only they can research the technology. What you're doing is giving the Altarians the worse version that everyone else already has instead of giving them a fixed unique improvement. So, the fix we're suggesting doesn't make everybody else like the Altarians, it's your suggested fix that makes the Altarians more like everybody else.

Talked about this in today's devstream with Paul and this MIGHT be intentional (though he might not have been sure what I was talking about).  But Paul said he might look into it and see if the problem is as bad as some of us make it out to be.

On the one hand, the Altraians do get a couple of extra bonus terraforming improvements that literally no one else gets (they get an extra Habitat level terraforming improvement for instance).  On the other hand, if the Altarians don't win early, they get screwed as the rest of the universe Ultra-Terraforms them to death.

So great early.  Much less so as the game goes on.  IMO, crippling so as Altaria simply can't keep up any longer once everyone else gets to the Age of Ascension.  It's the classic Tortoise v Hare problem.  This wouldn't be so bad if the Altarians were a crush you quickly type race like the Drengin.  But they are more of Tortoise type faction that tends to take a while to really get going.  But this design development for their planets seems to run directly counter to it.  The Altarians simply won't have the same level of planets that everyone else will when they theoretically should be hitting their stride.

+1

I also would like to see this getting fixed soon, or eventually I will have to mod it myself, which I find is like cheating.

Ever since the culture flipping has been nerfed to oblivion it's pretty much impossible to win against tougher AI playing the Altarians because once the other factions terraform their planets to maximum in late game this creates a huge gap between the other Factions and the Altarians. The others spam improvements everywhere boosting everything and the Altarians are pretty much screwed because they can't keep up with the military upbuild (due to lacking manufacturing) and moral penalty (due to lack of space to build more moral improvements).

I mean on small galaxies and fast games this is not a huge issue, but if you play Gigantic and above and invest several dozen hours this becomes just extremely unbalanced.