Atmosphere conversion?

[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.

[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.