When you have the Advanced Colonization mods and have built the Orbital Terraformer, those low-class uninhabited worlds are sweet wedges ... the moment you colonize, that pathetic Class-1 is now a Class-15 or so. It works well for wedging into opposing AI territories, expanding your influence or at least giving your civ some breathing room in a sort of "second wave" of colonization after all the regularly inhabitable worlds have been taken.

You lot say that planets that need the techs are crap. But I have 10+ that are class 26 above with out planetary enhancements. And thats just my empire.

You should also note that sometimes planets with only 1 or 2 PQ have a huge number of convertable squares. With time such planets can become VERY useful.

Such things are all parts of the strategy as you can go either way.

I like them simply for the suspense you get when you see that purple star through the shroud. OMG, I beat the Torians to a good planet....BARREN!!!?!?!! *string of obcenities*

Then there's the whole issue of colonization events - either the AIs don't get them, or they choose poorly. Is it worth the investment to have the chance of getting a +60% ship bonus?

Also, most of the high level players advocate not building anything on planets until the population is pretty well grown, anyway. What does it matter if you're building nothing at 50% speed? Get the first level techs by research, trade, or theft, then worry about the second techs later.

Has anyone figured out a way to turn off this option? I didn't seem to find anything anywhere else.

I could have sworn there was an option to turn the frequency of extreme planets way down if not all the way off during map creation.

The extreme planet frequency slider is a TA-only feature (and only as of 2.x).

Sadly, it didn't get backported to DA.

If you like, you can go into the raceconfig xmls of each of the races (to be fair-or just yours, if you're feeling mean) and set the five extreme colonization abilities (at the bottom) to 100.

Whether you put it as an inherent in the ability slot or as a points-costing ability is irrelevant, since it isn't an option and therefore doesn't cost points.

And since the game only recognizes 0, 50, and 100% values, even if you stack the techs on top of inherent abilities, or set your inherent abilities to greater than 100, it still doesn't mess anything up.

This will solve the issue for you for sandbox, but it will invalidate an MV game.