Terraforming rating

Your terraforming rating is the number everyone stares at and most newer players still undervalue. It’s doing three jobs at once:

1. It’s income. You’re paid TR + MC production every generation.
2. It’s points. Your TR at game end is victory points, one for one.
3. It’s the clock. TR only rises when the planet moves, and the planet finishing is what ends the game.

The compounding argument

Raise your TR by 1 in generation 3 of a 13-generation game and it pays you about 10 extra MC across the rest of the game — and it’s still worth its point at the end. The same raise in the final generation pays nothing and is worth the same single point.

Early TR is a production card that also scores. This is why tempo strategies work at all, and why an early asteroid or ocean is never as “boring” as it looks.

The community’s math makes it concrete: a TR always costs about 10 MC, but it’s worth roughly 2.5 points in the opening and exactly 1 point on the final generation — the point never decays, the income does. Same price all game, shrinking product. Buy it early.

The cheap TR sources

• Oceans are usually the best TR on the board: many ocean cards are priced kindly, and the placement bonuses (cards, steel, plants — and 2 MC for every ocean adjacency later) pay you twice.
• Heat → temperature is slow but free: energy left at the end of a generation becomes heat, and heat becomes TR at 8 a step. An engine that passively makes 2-3 heat a generation is quietly climbing.
• Plants → greeneries are the premium conversion: TR and a VP and oxygen, every 8 plants, forever.

When TR is a trap

Not often — but pure-TR sprinting with no economy behind it runs dry around mid-game: you finish with a nice TR and no money to convert into anything else, while a player with an engine catches and passes you in the last third. TR rush works when the game will be short; engines win when the game runs long. Which one tonight’s game is, is partly your choice — see Tempo & the clock.

The other player’s TR

Watch Matthew’s TR the way you watch your own money. A TR gap of 5+ in the early-mid game is real pressure: he’s out-earning you and out-scoring you, and your engine needs to be visibly better to justify the gap. If it isn’t, start terraforming — the longer you wait, the fewer steps remain to claim.