Wish I could take credit for the rain shadows, but it's from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which has a very elaborate terraforming system that I simplified and adjusted to make fit this game.
I agree that I should have made the ships' role explicit. I'm sure better UI design could convey more information with less text than the walls of instructions on the tutorial levels, but I didn't have time to implement many quality-of-life features (such as undo, action preview, resource icons on tiles, or a resources harvested indicator)