Been playing exclusively with the latest build of 1.1 and I noticed something, well I'll say "interesting" and leave it at that for now.
As of the current release of 1.1, the Ultra-Terraformer has been nerfed. It used to be that the Ultra-Terraformer (called UT in the rest of this post) would handle all of the upgradable tiles that both Planetary Soil Upgrade (called PSU in the rest of the post) and Soil Engineering (called SE in the rest of the post) would be able to upgrade. Over time these colloquially became known as "tier one (tile)" upgrades. Well this is no longer the case. As of 1.1, PSU and SE now affect different levels of tiles (more on this in a moment). More importantly, UT affects a group of tiles one set "lower" than PSU does. While this isn't a huge deal for most players, the upshot of this is, if people don't want to have the possibility of "losing" tiles, they can no longer use PSU and SE when they first become available.
The reason for this is simple. When PSU, SE, and UT all affected the same quality of tile (once again, more on this in a moment), it really didn't matter what order one did them in, it was all the same. So players could build the PSU and SE without worrying about losing a set level of tiles. However, now that they are split into three different levels, there is the possibility of "wasting" a PSU and/or SE on a "tier 0" tile that should be reserved for the UT exclusively.
Now, for the math to back this observation up.
It used to be that the PSU, SE, and UT all affected tiles that were at .3 LandPercentageMin (the lower the percentage, the higher the tech needed to put a tile on it). Now, it is:
UT: .4
PSU: .35
SE. .3
Presumably this means there needs to be approx 40%/35%/30% of the tile covered by land to upgrade it. So right off the bat, yes the UT does indeed affect less tiles than it does before (as has been observed by a couple of players). The problem, and I use that word advisedly, is this: There is no way to tell the difference between a .4 tile (UT), .35 tile (PSU), and .3 tile (SE). Thus if a player upgrades a .4 tile with PSU or SE instead of a .35 or .3 tile, they have "wasted" a tile they could have gotten later. This is because all .4 tiles should be covered by the UT and the UT alone, allowing players to use a PSU tile on .35 and above tiles and SE on .3 and above tiles if they want to get the maximum number of tiles possible for a planet.
Perhaps not a big deal to the non-power gamers out there. But this is a huge change from how the game has been working for quite a long time, so I thought I would shine a flashlight on it and draw some attention to what is currently going on.
Just means I better get cracking on my home "fix" where one can use all terraforming improvements multiple times (with cost played with to account for it being used more often, natch) so I don't have to worry about this silliness anymore. 