Just received the terraforming quest.
...how in the world can a non-spacefaring race evolve on a planet and turn out to be "least-suited" to live on it? I won't question the probabilities of two handfuls of sentient races developing space flight in the same solar system at almost the same time, but what's the logic in not being suited to the environment you come from?
I have no idea what the dev's intended explanation for this is, but I don't think the concept is too far fetched.
There's nothing that really says that the planet's environment was always the way it is at the time the game takes place. Climate changes, ice ages come and go, asteroids hit and mess things up, and so on.
There's also nothing that says the conditions are uniform either. The species could have evolved to sentience in a relatively small portion of the planet, but as their technology advanced they may have been able to colonize the rest of the planet.
In real life, you could even argue that we humans live on a planet that largely isn't "perfectly suited" to us! A lot of the places we live on are too cold, too hot, or too barren of natural food for us to live there more naturally. We expend a significant portion of our resources on things that allow us to live in areas of our planet we wouldn't be able to live on otherwise.
We arguably have room to potentially "terraform" Earth to be more "suitable" to us. We could potentially make deserts and tundras less hostile, develop trees that can process CO2 more efficiently, acquire more farmland, somehow make places like Antarctica more livable to us, and so on and so forth. Sure a lot of these would be freakishly complicated and have a lot of potential positive and negative implications, but you get the idea.