Thank you for your inputs, I was just trying to assert that such costs exists and should be factored.
If we are discussing min-max I agree that they are more efficient but we need to account all costs related to both parties, and we are also excluding the cost of workers and the underlaying infrastructure when using installations.
Seconded on the infrastructure to support workers on a planet being terraformed. Given their large population requirement and the fact that your cargo lift capacity (both empire-owned and civilian contracted) will already be heavily tasked moving the terraforming plants themselves, it's a real pain. Manufacturing it doesn't take that long; and the costs are also pretty affordable - especially since the civilian industry will start manufacturing it "for free" and as far as I've seen, that infrastructure isn't tracked separately (I believe it
was in VB6) so you can just pick it up and redistribute it later. No, it really is the logistical challenge of getting that stuff
to its destination that causes an issue. Oh, AND you have to move the population, as well! (Though the opportunity cost issues here are highly situation as they depend on how many colony ships you've built and how heavily you typically task them.) Doing this within Sol is annoying, but not difficult. Doing it even one system over can be an issue. Doing it two or three jumps out? It can take years. Cheap terraforming stations that are towed into place are
stupidly superior.
There's two caveats to this:
If cash-poor, the best investment is financial centers, not overpriced other installations.
I tend to under-build compared to the average Aurora player (or at least compared to Steve, judging from his AAR's) because I consistently find my biggest crunch isn't minerals, but
wealth. So it's not a matter of "do I need more wealth or more terraformers?" because I
always need more wealth - and I also need the terraformers anyway. So the fact the terraforming installations Create Jobs™
is significant to me. Birds, stones etc.
The second consideration is commander bonuses.
Unless I am mistaken, ship-based production benefits from the ship's commander and any parent naval admin command(s), but not the civilian governor of the planet. This can be significant because generating enough commanders to fully fill out your orbital terraformer platform fleet(s) can be a real challenge - in fact Steve is upping the number of naval commanders produced next patch to address this issue overall (with multiple officers per ship due to modules the overall tax on the officer pool is higher.) If you have a civilian administrator with a decent to high terraforming bonus (and by the time you get out of Sol you'll probably have at least the guy who used to be in charge of Mars leveled up a bit from experience) you can get more out of each terraformer, and that's important because
time is a precious resource unto itself, one you can't always quantify like minerals, etc.
I call these
caveats because they don't, in any way, shape, or form, begin to make terraforming installations competitive. The
logistics are the killer. Yes, orbitals tie up tugs and those are always in short supply (no matter how many I build I always need more) but they're tied up
infrequently as they move the fleet to the next target planet and there they will sit, for months, usually for
years. Production speed - since you can crank out the terraformer component with construction factories (or the entire finished product if you always use towed space stations as I do) there's no real difference in production, except that the installations are a bit slower (because they cost 100 more minerals)
and because you have to build an initial investment of infrastructure to go along with them! And
then you get to tie up a
lot of your empire's cargo lift capacity to move the whole shebang any serious distance past a single jump out of Sol!
Humbly, I submit that the cost of ground-based Terraforming Installations should be significantly reduced - to 300, if not even further. Maybe 150-200. It'd not just be balanced, but also more lore-friendly; explaining why what takes
one million workers on the ground can be done by a crew of a few hundred in space -
automation. And automation
costs. So if you have the lift capacity and spare population banging at the window to get into the new upper-class of the "TN economy," you have real incentive to go the manual route; plopping down "shake-and-bake" colonies so you can start Building Better Worlds.™