WEATHER PARADIGM

• Increases terraforming speed by 50% for all tasks except remove fungus
• Your formers may build condensors and boreholes, and may raise/lower terrain, even if you have not yet discovered the appropriate technologies.

    Of the three "first level" projects, the Weather Paradigm is almost as useful as the Human Genome Project (more so, in some games) and much more useful than the Merchant Exchange. The Gaians start the game with the ability to build this project.

    Its significant ongoing benefit is the reduction in terraforming time, which represents an extremely significant development advantage over the other factions (particularly in view of how early this project comes...you'll be getting that extra terraformer time for a long time to come).

    Perhaps equally important, however, is the ability to perform advanced terraforming operations significantly earlier than would otherwise be possible. Intelligently used, this can create an early production advantage over the other factions that they might well never recover from. If you happened to land in an arid region, the ability to increase the fertility of new bases by building condensors or raising ridges can be crucial to getting your faction's beachhead on it's territory firmly established. Be conservative about those early-game boreholes*, however...they can come back to bite you, in terms of ecolgical consequences, later in the game.

* Webmaster's note: I don't personally agree with this philosophy. See my tips on creating massive Borehole fields.