There is no reason to terraform Mars, for example, because the civvies make you a ton of money hauling infrastructure on that short route and there are no negative effects from the uninhabitablity.
Looks like this quote got pulled from the 5.14 suggestions thread.
The "no negative effects" statement is incorrect. The % population requirement for infrastructure goes up with colonization cost. The service sector % goes up with population. If the population and colonization cost are large enough, eventually the % available workers will be zero.
In addition, the infrastructure flowing to Mars will prevent infrastructure flowing to other, extra-solar, colonies.
John
"No negative effects" is wrong in a very broad sense. I would still maintain it is correct here with Mars. I've not been playing nearly as long as most here, but my observation over several games has been: get Mars started up and the civvies will keep the infrastructure ahead of the pop needs. My latest game the civvies make 6 or 7 Mars runs for every extrasolar run, and they should, because it is a faster run for the same money. I've never run out of available workers on a colony except at the very beginning, because population quickly outstrips your ability to build facilities. Similarly, after getting the first couple colonies started, I don't build infrastructure except in a rare case. First, because I just move my terraformer ships out to the next colony and let them work while I build up the first few worlds plus the mining colonies (industry bottleneck again), and second, because if I really need it I'll terraform Mars a little and use some of the free infrastructure the civvies have given me (Mars has over 5000 in my current game, of which I paid for 300).
I don't regard this as anything like a game-breaker. It's more like this game feels so much more like what space colonization would really be like to me, so much more real, if you like, than any other 4x I've played, that this little exploit bothers me disproportionately.
