with all the discussion in the gamma ballancing over various topics i think its a good idea to split this from the rest.

first of all i think we need to find a way to keep and improve the "beacon terraforming" or at least the "plan terraforming". without this terraforming will be a pain and ppl will not realy be able to terraform anything "nice" this will be a major turn off and if we cant create something nice to our liking with decent tools then i think it might be better to remove terraforming all together. and i think this is not what we want. so the main goal should be to make this work. and maybe we can help with that process.

i had some time to think about it. so here some of my thoughts. of cource i am no software engineer and i have no insight of how things are coded atm.

Terraforming with plan for what reason?:
well i think its pretty clear that the purpose on that is for base building and not for base assault. so i see no problems if you have some limits in this to prevent unintended things from happening.

Block "plan terraforming" in the same area
one simple idea to prevent multible plan usage in one area is to simply not allow it.
lets say you create a plan, put a probe on it and fire the probe. the terrain will then move according as a whole towards the plan. to prevent interaction of 2 or more plans you simple cant activate a probe if their plan is overlapping with another one that has a "active" probe. for save keeping even add a 5 or 10 tile "phantom border" to the plans that are not allowed to touch while terraforming.
you can even add a visual effect like a beacon of light that might be visible over a few km on active terraforming probes to make it even more obvious why somebody migh get a error message and cant terraform there.

Volume of terraforming
i personaly never liked the way the terraforming worked. by simply moving up and down in a certain radius. i would prefer if the amount of terraforming per charge would be a fix volume. cant be too hard to make when you have a difference volume shown in the terrafroming plans.
this would allow relative exact planing how many changes you have to bring to complete a terraforming plan.

Slope terraforming:
now that we have slope limits i think it will eb very important to get a better slope/ramp tool for the editor.
at the moment the ramp tool is mor a bit of luck and multible repeat untill you get what you want.
my option would be more that you can define 2 lines by selecting 4 points (preferable with snap to grid)
with there 4 points you can define 2 lines which will function as base lines for your ramp. that way you can relatively easy create ramps with difined borders in various 3d angles and different base and top sizes. for example you can create a pyramid with this quite easy for what you would take hours with the tools we have atm.
other generic forms lik4e circles, ellipses, cones and partial forms of them might also be a very good idea.
a 6 point ramp tool for the use of a arc instead of a line as definition might also be a additional idea.
all of this are geonometrical forms and should be relatively easy to code as long as you dont stick with hungarian math .

and also a preview button would be nice before you apply the changes. so you can still move the single points and see the outcome. that way you can adjust without loosing all your definition points.

Single tile terraforming:
if we have problems with multible plans overlaping to generate unwanted slopes then we might have the same problems with single tile terraforming as well if two ppl do things close to each other. so do we need limitations here as well?

Permanent debugging / checking slopes:
to make sure that bad things will not happen and can be exploited by the players i think we need some underlaying debug/savety mechanism.
i think to determin the slopes of tiles might not be a problem. so what ever the code looks like that changes the terrain, you can also check the slopes of the affected tiles at every terraforming. if a slope is created that is unwanted then you can revert/block the terraforming and send a automated bugreport to the devs so they know something went wrong and there is something to fix.
unwanted slopes are above max slope in terms the tile was below that, or a in slope increase in terms of the tile already had more then max slope.

so far
zort