Change Terran -> Forest

[Yoghurt]

How about something along the lines of "diverse ecosystem"?

[Geoff the Medio]

How about something along the lines of "diverse ecosystem"?

Ecological diversity is something that could occur on numerous environments, not just earth-like / terran / forrested / temperate / arboreal / steppish / meadowy / jungle worlds. It might make a nice special, though.

[Ran Taro]

How about "Verdant"?

[LithiumMongoose]

I feel compelled to point out, as you can see here:
http://www.camelotherald.com/spells/

That Verdant and Arboreal are two of the three Animist class spec lines in DAoC. The third being Creeping.

...

That being said, Terran and Arboreal get my vote.

[utilae]

How about:

Diverse

Meaning all kinds of life supporting environments can occur.

[Burgundavia]

Diverse is kind of ambigous. Verdant or Forest seems to capture the spirit best.

Corey

[utilae]

Verdant will require a dictionary and forest is not very good because you can have an ice planet or tundra planet that has a forest on it. Even a desert could have a forest on it.

I like diverse the best.

Although we could base the name on the soil type.
eg
soil type for desert is sand
soil type for ice/tundra is snow/ice
soil type for water is seabed or watersurface
soil type for terran/diverse/etc is dirt

[Ran Taro]

If you are going to name it for surface type, I would think "Rock" would be better than "Dirt". Rock could apply to a lot more planets than, say Verdant or Arboreal, or Terran though.

Space Empires IV has Rock/Ice/Gas I think.

So you could have.

Sand
Ice
Water/Liquid
Lava
Irradiated
Rock
Swamp

Corresponding to different types on the current wheel. It's a bit less flavourful though.

[edit] I'm not sure Verdant requires a dictionary though. I think many english speakers might not be able to give a dictionary defination off hand, but would probably have a vague idea it refers to a green environment. Which is exactly the feeling I think we are looking to capture...

[Ran Taro]

Just to throw a couple more ideas in there.

How about "Terrestrial" as a less human-centric reference to an earth like planet?

Or how about refering to the enviromant/ atmosphere created through the action of green plants, as in "Oxygenated"?

Or something better with a similar meaning.

[Impaler]

Listen to yourselves guys "Verdant" "Diverse" "Dirt" no term has the simplicity, familiarity and evocative powers of Forest. (though Verdant might make a good planet special). As Geoff said Forest Planets are a staple of Sci-Fi film and liturature and we WANT Free Orion to be as cleshay as possible. As for Terestrial this is ofcorse a derivitive of Terran and almost identical in meaning, all my arguments are equaly valid for it as well.

[Dreamer]

I agree with impaler. If we start to find exeptions in every ecosystem we can find many. Deserts can have an oasis, tundras can have have forest in clifs or craters, oceans can have islands (and the islands can be desertic/verdant, etc) and so every terrain is diverse. Also, the moon is also rock, but the difference is in not having atmosphere so we have more dilemas there.

I think we have 2 possible aproaches to this. Either we want to be realistic and then we need to define terrain type by a soil-radiation(heat)-atmosfere tuple. Or, we define more stereotipical terrains like tundra, desert, inferno, etc. I like this one more and in this scenario forest is perfect.

[utilae]

Ok, if we are not going to be too picky, then I'd be happy with Forest or Jungle.

[LithiumMongoose]

Arboreal sounds cooler than Forest, and is a straight synonym. It may be more obscure but it is just as simple and has the same meaning. The only drawback imo is it's three syllables long instead of two, which means it takes longer to say out loud, which is bad for a game where it's a common term. So go with Forest if you must.

The real problem here is that some planets are diverse and some are not. Earth obviously is; just about all the others in our solar system are not:

The Moon = 100% Barren/Rock
Venus = 100% Toxic/Inferno
Mars = 100% Arid/Desert
Saturn = 100% Gas Giant
Pluto = 100% Ice Ball

I don't honestly know, if you were to take an astrological survey of hundreds of planets in the real universe, what percentage would be nearly homogenous and what percentage would be diverse like Earth. My guess is that the vast majority would be the former. This is because a large number of conditions have to all be right for anything else to emerge. There's also a time constraint; Earth was 100% Volcanic a few billion years ago. (Sorry Tyreth, I just don't buy into your alternate views on the age of our planet and stuff. ;)

A lot, if not most, of the fictional races in games like this tend to like homogenous planets of one type or another, so it's not necessarily a bad thing. You just have to understand that "Terran" is traditionally the catch-all designation for a diverse planet like Earth. My personal suspicion is that Terran planets where one type of thing dominates (Ocean, Tundra, Forest) would not be as likely, since once you have an atmosphere and liquid water and different climate zones, *all* of that stuff is likely to emerge in different regions, but I suppose it's possible.

But this is different from the types listed above, which are *not* subsets of the water/life/Terran scenario. Instead they are the result of overriding higher-level concerns like being too close to or far from the star, having a reduced or missing atmosphere, or being composed of nothing but gas.

So I would include Terran as is normally done to denote an Earth-like planet, regardless, since simplifying it to Forest is really not accurate. If you want to additionally include Ocean, Tundra, Forest, etc as Imbalanced Terran types for further specificity, I'm all for that as well.

Finally, I really liked the MOO3 terraforming/environmental graph, where every planet is plotted on a 2D graph according to its mean temperature and pressure, and every race has a sweet spot on the grid, and terraforming just moves the planet toward your race's sweet spot, and the region of the graph the planet is currently in determines its archetype for name and appearance purposes in the game. This system is not without its flaws though, since for example terraforming to or away from gas giant status should be a really huge leap compared to any other change, due to the fundamental change in composition.

Edit -- And yes I know there are some "realism" arguments in here, but ffs, this is one area where being realistic is important, since what we name different planet types doesn't seem like something that would affect gameplay design. Unless of course it results in a decision to divide planets into regions each with their own terrain and other characteristics, like MOO3 does... Which I'm sure we'll never do, even though I think we should. :)

[Dreamer]

I have to say that in fact in most sci-fiction there is no real planet diversity. Forests, deserts, tundras, jungles, swamps and the like are almos equal to each other if you look at the real world. In these scenarios the worst thing that can happen to you is that you have to wear a raincoat.

A pressure / temperature scale makes a lot more sence since it includes the inherent dificulty of living in difficult conditions. Gravity is also important. The reason why there is a problem using terran as an environment is that almost every one in the well IS a terran environment. We should admit that if we try to be realistic there is at least 4 or 5 independent variables that need to be considered to determine a planet's environment. This is a multi-dimentional space and we are scraching our heads trying to convert it to a line or worse, a circle.

Sometimes I think that we shouldn't try to explain so much the causes for a planet to be a forest or a tundra, we should just create a pool of environment types and pick one at random. I have alaways prefered no explanation than a bad explanation, it leaves the reasons to the imagination of each player (who remembers midichlorians?). In some ways a scale from 0 to X to measure how difficult a planet is would be better.

[utilae]

If you think about it, Earth is more of a forest planet than one that is diverse. This is because millions of years ago the vast majority of Earth was covered in jungles and forests. Then again if you think about it, 75% of Earth is ocean, so does that mean it's an ocean planet.