It improves your planets by a percentage the moment you colonize them. If you have a 50% Planet Quality Bonus and you colonize a class 10 planet it becomes a class 15 planet.

You know Marcathonas, I never really paid attention to whether or not it worked with the tiles.

It justs givs you a few extra tiles on the 'Earth'. It also lets you have more pop. Thats what i'v heard anyway...

I believe the current implementation of the racial PQ bonus is buggy.

For me its also working on every planet.
I colonize a lvl 10.
it gets a PQ 11 with 11 green tiles.
vs 1.10

I knew I had it bookmarked somewhere:
Link

I can confirm that the description in the thread puntarenas links to above works. At least...the vast majority of the time.

Basically, the 10 or 20% bonus will be applied when you colonize the planet (that's colonize...not take culturally or by force) and will increase the base PQ AND the initial number of tiles. There's also some chance that you will get 1 extra tile per soil enhancement/xxx (I forget what it's called)/terraforming, so in total 3 extra tiles ON TOP of the initial bonus. The odds of this happening are MORE than twice as likely with the 20% bonus ability than with the 10% ability, which is why the 20% ability costs more than twice the ability points of the 10% boost.

It's my understanding, though I never bothered checking, that PQ ability also increases the PQ of captured planets. However, it does NOT give you extra tiles. It does give you a larger population cap and potentially the 10% "good planet" morale bonus.

I'm assuming that the reason they're not paying too much attention to the game text yet because things are still very much in a state of flux. I'd expect to see them fix it all up once they've finished tinkering.

Maybe a Galciv 1 owner can comment on this?