I just finished a civ4 space scenario and had a lot of fun with the space scenario so I wanted to try out a space version of Civ. I recently tried out GCII and found the game to be really interesting, especially the tech tree and custom units. The game seems pretty realistic, in its universe, except for one thing. For some reason the eastern coast of the USA, Moscow, India, South america, and Canada are all uninhabitable .

When I started colonizing other planets I noticed that usually plains are inhabitable. However, I have had planets where most plains are uninhabitable while I am building factories on the ocean, oceans that look the same as the land. I thought it might have something to do with terraforming, but my people cannot seem to figure out how to build a factory on the large open plain south of my initial colony. My people are able to put hyperdrives on ships and travel across the galaxy, yet they cannot figure out how to build a simple building on flat terrain. I could understand if I just needed to spend time transforming each new plot I want to use, but most of them cannot seem to be terraformed. It is very annoying, especially when Earth is mostly unusable (and in reality we are exploiting every inch of her). (Btw I am talking about 10+ planets)

Is there any type of mod that fixes this and makes colonization make a little sense? Or do the expansions fix this?