SimEarth was one of my favorites as a kid. That large manual you mention - I remember actually reading that cover-to-cover back then and finding it fascinating.
> fire is required for smarts, and therefore the SimEarthlings need land.
I don't know that that's strictly speaking 100% true. Now, it's been roughly 3 decades since I've played in any real sense so give me some leeway if I get this wrong, but I definitely recall doing something like "pull a 2001 move and place a monolith" in order to get sentient cetaceans. Something about the idea of a dolphin & porpoise civilization really tickled my fancy for whatever reason. The annoying thing is that I don't think you can have more than 1 sentient life form at a time, so if I was hoping to get my swimmy friends on top I might occasionally need to drop a meteor or two to keep squash the beginnings of intelligent insects or whatever.
BTW if any of your readers don't happen to have the kind of hardware you do... SimEarth works OK in dosbox.
SimEarth was one of my favorites as a kid. That large manual you mention - I remember actually reading that cover-to-cover back then and finding it fascinating.
> fire is required for smarts, and therefore the SimEarthlings need land.
I don't know that that's strictly speaking 100% true. Now, it's been roughly 3 decades since I've played in any real sense so give me some leeway if I get this wrong, but I definitely recall doing something like "pull a 2001 move and place a monolith" in order to get sentient cetaceans. Something about the idea of a dolphin & porpoise civilization really tickled my fancy for whatever reason. The annoying thing is that I don't think you can have more than 1 sentient life form at a time, so if I was hoping to get my swimmy friends on top I might occasionally need to drop a meteor or two to keep squash the beginnings of intelligent insects or whatever.
BTW if any of your readers don't happen to have the kind of hardware you do... SimEarth works OK in dosbox.