Atmosphere conversion?

[Parasite]

Start building them when you reach lvl7. Get the next levels while they are still in the queue. Put them on hold with one turn left if you need to. When you reach lvl9, click "Upgrade All" (or something like that) on the main production page. It will upgrade your partially completed converters to the highest level. It works just like you were building the highest level all the time.

[boran_blok]

Agreed that is the best way to build anything while you're researching for newer versions.

[Slick]

I still think the best way to undome a planet is to concentrate efforts to capture other-breathing population. Even if you capture one of those suckers, you can breed them and undome all the planets in your empire with their offspring.

You can capture one of the planets, trade, capture a pop transport or a colonizer, use intel, etc.

Don't forget to address their natural trend to unhappiness, though. Troops or one of the happiness facilities is a good way to do that.

[Zereth]

Slick said:
Don't forget to address their natural trend to unhappiness, though. Troops or one of the happiness facilities is a good way to do that.

I favor the "Ships in orbit" method of happiness control. Build a few defense and cosntruction bases around the planet and (at least in the stock happiness types) they'll be Jubilant in no time, and the bases contribute to your construciton or defense rather than consuming cargo or facility space. (Of course, I _Also_ design all my races with max maintence reduction, so this may not be as useful to a race who pays more maintence.)

A handful of troops is useful on those captured enemy planets that don't come with spaceyards, though.

[Fyron]

Troops require 0 maintenance. You can load 120 or so police troops on every planet for guaranteed jubilance in all but the most dire of situations. I'd still go with 0 maintenance troops in favor of low maintenance ships, myself. If you arm them, your planets become marginally more difficult to capture and you have a ready pool of troops in emergencies as added bonuses.

[Emperor's Child]

Why 120? If memory serves, you only need 10 troops to eliminate the turn to turn natural decrease that non-native population will see. In my games I make sure I build 15+ to ensure a small upswing and over time it will be enough. Only for colonies that get isolated by enemy colonies (and their associated ship traffic in system) will I bump the number higher to 30 or so, and that seems to be sufficient.

And don’t forget the trick of building “security troops.” This is a small troop with only a cockpit, but nothing else. This is the cheapest (and fastest) way to keep those folks happy since you can build them almost twice as fast as regular troops, but they won’t do anything if you are invaded.

[Fyron]

This post assumes the default Peaceful happiness type. Neutral is absolutely worthless and police troops have the same benefits with Bloodthirsty.

Note that the "police troops" I use are exactly your "security troops." They are always small, and weapons are optional. Some people like to arm them to get a ready source of troops to handle rebellion events and such, as well as extra defense against invasions. Not that they help much against a large transport filled with shielded large troops, of course.

You can get a max change of 20% (aka 200) up or down per turn. 100 troops is sufficient for getting this 200 (at 2 per troop). The 20 is just for a bit of redundancy. The purpose of police troops is not to make the people happy when all goes well. They are there to keep the people jubilant through the worst of situations. It is disturbingly easy for an unprotected empire to go from jubilance to riots in a short while if a war takes a turn for the worst. The troops can prevent this from happening and provide you with the possibility for recovery.

With 120 troops, you can suffer up to 240 happiness points worth of losses per turn and not have any decrease in happiness. This equates to 240 ships or almost 5 planets in a single turn. You could lose 2 planets and 140 ships and suffer no ill affects to happiness throughout the empire. In most games, I find it highly unusual to be able to lose more than this in a single turn. If you do, you have probably already lost and are just being mopped up by the enemy. But even if you lose more than this in one turn, chances are you won't lose just as much in the next turn, so having enough troops to get 240 percent increase in happiness will bring you right back up to jubilance, with an added window of still being able to lose 1 planet or 40 ships and not matter.

Granted, against the AI, this isn't always necessary, as the AI is not too challenging. It mostly applies to multiplayer games.

No amount of ships can achieve these same riot protection results. Having 20 ships stationed over every planet or 67 in every system (to get 200 happiness increase per turn) is generally a very bad idea, as your offensive forces will be few and far between (or even nonexistent).

[douglas]

Who said anything about safely transporting the previous inhabitants to another world? Just dump them out the airlock. One turn per planet is all it takes with just one transport, and can be done at the same time as the dropoff. If you're not concerned about roleplay, there is absolutely no negative effect for doing this besides losing the usually inconsequentially small population bonus to production and construction rates.