Uninhabitable planets can also be subject to events, transforming them into asteroid belts, inhabitable or even inhabited planets.

In my very first game I had several asteroid belt events, a minor race popping up mid-game (on a formerly unihabitable planet) and an event where discovery of a precursor artifact created a mass of class 3 planets (that were no further terraformable .

ps: I do not know whether anything of the above can happen in the original Dread Lords game (asteroid belts are obviously out). There, they're still scenery and obstacles at least.

Technically your ships are reacting to asteroid belts in DA/TA by reducing their movement to 1 parsec.  They really slow down to avoid the damage of hitting them.

Uninhabitale planets in TA can become asteroid belts with the use of a Terror Star blowing up the system.  Any habitale planets in that system get turned into asteroids too lol.

It would be just as easy to make the uninhabitable planets only show up on the minimap. They are nothing but useless clutter on the main map.

Maybe the developers just wanted to add a bit more random detail to what might have been otherwise blank screen space.  But I wish they'd devoted more effort (and maybe a bit more screen space) to making the icons more useful -- things like indicating ship direction and speed, and maybe showing more useful planet information without having to change views.

I know a lot of people just love the heck out of the spacecraft detailing, but does anyone really spend a lot of time playing in close-up view?  I practically never do.  Personally, I'm about a hundred times more interested in the actual game part of the game than in the pretty ship fenders.

Incase you have not noticed this is a game we are talking about anything can be patched, added, deleted etc, nothing - including terrain - is set in stone.

If you increase Habitable Planets and decrease Number of Planets in the setup options you can minimize the number of class 0 worlds.

That got me thinking, uninhabbitable planets have one square where you can build a special type of automatic / robotic building (with the right tech), spy base, research station etc. Possability of random events such as the research station does dangerous research (thats why it is automatic) and the research gets out infecting, destroying ... the system.

That gives you a reason to place them in enemy space and you cant tell one is there until you orbit the planet and which point you can use a contructor ship to either convert it to you are decommision it.

Well, maybe not for this GCII iteration... but, i've heard they ***will*** have a GC3 & nothing stops me or anyone else from suggesting whatever new stuff they'd like them to consider at least.

There are a number of threads in this very forum which are, indeed, extrapolations into people's wishes for other gameplay features and if the past is any indication SD staff is always listening to us all.

hmmm.. i like the ideas about using class 0 planets for something, but i think it would have to come from a different tech string - not to mention they would have to create aquatic uninhabitable, radioactive etc.

This could add a lot of content to the game, and as people said theres loads of things they could be used for (heres some of mine, and a few that i liked that have been mentioned already)

-Refuelling stations, be it a space station orbiting the planet, or an actual self contained building on the planet, refuelling stations could add ship range without adding any influence, they could be 'captured' by enemies and a line of techs could make yours more secure!

-Mines, who says we can only mine asteroids? I'm sure that any planet will be just as usefull to mine, but then again there will be gravity issues and whatnot so space mining 2/3 could allow you to do that?

-Sensor hubs and relays, after all any civilistaion in space will want to keep an eye on its territories, so they would inevitably want to build sensor stations in outlying systems that are likely to avoid enemy sightings, and in the spy sense that others have mentioned before wouldnt it be cool to spy on New Iconia 3 from 4? decode enemy messages and generally spy!

-When you go to attack a system you look for enemy ships in space and orbiting a planet, but wouldn't it be a lot harder to look for a ship that was hiding on an uninhabitable planet? Of course such ships would require specialised landing gear to land on a planet with say, no atmosphere.

-Research stations, as aforementioned these could be really hany places to mess with some pretty dangerous techs!