With the new changes to hydrosphere... Would it be possible to get a terraforming option for directly adding/removing water instead of bothering with water vapour? I mean, besides it being better micro wise, while for adding water nothing changes, in case of removing water now I'm kinda screwed. Previously to avoid tedium I'd raise temperature above 100 degress, remove some of the vapour and then cool the planet down again. Now with the new changes this is no longer viable because it takes time for water to evaporate, meaning I can't just directly set water level to what I want in one go.
Adding water vapour and waiting for it to condense was done by design to make terraforming planets without water more of a challenge. The same is true for ocean worlds where you need to remove water.
Heating the planet, adding/removing water vapour and then lowering the temperature to condense all the water at once was an exploit. The 'instant condense/evaporate' when changing between liquid and vapour was intended as a quick fix for situations where that boundary is passed only once during terraforming. Now that eccentric orbits have been added and the boundary may be crossed many times, an update to the water cycle was needed, which had the secondary effect of closing that loophole.
Well, I hardly see this mechanic as a "challenge" and my solution as an "exploit". IMO much more fitting terms would be "tedious micro" and a "solution to reduce micro". All I want to say here is that it hardly matters, all in all in both cases you have to spend some in-game time to get water to what you want, except:
-you can't "fire and forget" like with other gasses you set once because you know you want 21% oxygen and 1 atm total for a second earth world, you need to constantly watch whether enough water has condensed already and you need to stop adding vapour or not
-in case of
removing water, good luck terraforming an ocean world if every few in-game days the game pauses to tell you that "all water vapour has been removed" but very little water disappeared from the planet. Like, you'd be able to run maybe 30 days max without an interrupt and having to give terraforming order once again, repeating it possibly for bazillion times until all the excess water is gone. That was my experience that led me to inventing the heating "exploit"
Thankfully the "exploit" is still possible, just means I'llhave to additionally wait after heating the planet above 100 degrees while constantly checking whether I can start removing vapour, but Steve, please, please consider making hydrosphere adjustment straightforward for the sake of smoother gameplay, make it as slow as you wish, even slower in-game time-wise than it is now to keep whatever challenge you want, but please... 🙏