I'd looked for an MLP crossover with Test of Time before but not found it until now. I'm so glad I've finally found it. ToT was my favourite game for most of my childhood, and it's still one of my top 5.

Fun fact: Test of Time was published by Hasbro. The combination of the obsessions of both my child and adult life is why I love that company, and also why I'm slightly concerned about how much power it has over me.

...I've only skimmed over the first part of the story so far, but what I've seen looks well written, so I'm optimistic.

5078791 By the way, what was your favorite mode? Sci fi (like me), Original, Extended Original, or Fantasy? Also, I'm having a few problems right now, so I'm currently unable to complete Book 2A. It's almost done, though.

5079354 I mostly played the extended original. I liked how the aliens and humans only meet near the end of the game where they've each gone down their own developmental path.

5086727 Ah. Interesting. I preferred Scifi (in case you somehow couldn't tell), because it was actually a crossover mode. It was a crossover between Civ and Master of Orion, and I think that's really awesome. It's made even better by how they never directly tell you it's a crossover, so unless you check the game files, you'd most likely never realize the alien ant people are the klackons from Master of Orion. I also liked how all of the human tech is actually based on scientific studies going on around the time of ToT's release, making the human tech fall into Hard Scifi, which is rare to see in a game. And they even located Fusestis in real life a while back! Though the scientific community calls it "Terra Nova" (if I can find a way to get enough influence, I'll make sure I get its name changed to honor Sid Meier's prediction of a terrestroid in that location).

5087996 You realise that the planet "Terra Nova" is fictional, right? We haven't actually discovered any planets around Lalande 21185 yet, and there's only evidence for 2 gas giants.

5090322 Oh. Well, Sid's reasoning for two more planets in the system was how the study of the gravity in that system points to the possibility of more planets in the system. I thought that all the hype about a new terrestroid that had been going on in the scientific community a little while ago meant they'd actually found something.

5090501 There have been a few interesting things, like the possibility of a ninth planet in our solar system, and an earth-like planet around wolf 1061, which is only 14 LY away, but not anything involving Lalande.

5098168 Ah. Well, to me, I still consider Pluto a planet. In fact, I actually consider Ceres—the largest object in the Asteroid Belt, as well as the only "asteroid" (that I know of) to actually be a near-perfect sphere—to be a planet. To me, there are already ten, and I've heard about this new planet in our system, but unlike others who are calling it "planet nine" for the time being, I see it as the eleventh. I believe Pluto counts because the discovery of Pluto allowed us to eventually discover the Kuiper Belt, and I see Ceres as a planet for a similar reason: Ceres was the first object to be discovered in the Asteroid Belt, and because of Ceres, the Belt itself was discovered six months later (which is also the time they decided to strip it of its planet status, regardless of it being the only spherical object they saw there at the time). I just feel that these two objects should be given special treatment because of how they contributed to expanding our knowledge of the system. That, and I don't like how they decided to define a planet when they demoted Pluto. By that logic, Neptune can't be a planet because it doesn't actually clear its entire orbit with its gravity. Its orbit crosses with the Kuiper Belt, after all.

Now, as for Lalande, in the mid '90s, studies of the Lalande 21185 system revealed that the way the star and its two known planets move points to the existence of more mass in that system than we've found. Sid used the possibility that the extra mass might be one or more planets when he and his team created the Scifi mode for ToT. The star and the two gas giants we can see don't move as they would if they were the only things there.

And finally, the possibility of an earth-like planet orbiting wolf 1061 sounds pretty cool. But, I've learned a few things about what makes Earth habitable for life as complex as human beings. One of these things is the presence of Jupiter. Jupiter acts like a gravity-based shield for the inner Solar System. Its immense gravity snatches up many objects that could wipe out all life on Earth and turns them into more moons. We'll never have a final tally for how many moons Jupiter has, for it keeps grabbing more. The other gas giants provide extra layers of defense, but Jupiter is the main shield. Well, the Asteroid Belt helps a bit, too. Any object on a collision course with Earth that somehow made it past Jupiter also has to make it past the Asteroid Belt, which also has a lot of mass, trapping pretty much anything that got past Jupiter, turning it into another asteroid. It'd take a lot of momentum to make it past the Kuiper Belt, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, and the Asteroid Belt. Every single one of them would most likely slow it down if they fail to capture the object, leaving most objects from outside the system either too slow to actually pose a true threat to Earth, or completely thrown off-course, missing Earth entirely (I say "most" because there was that rock that wiped out most of the dinosaurs (the only kind I know of that actually survived the mass-extinction event was the Stegosaurs, and even they eventually died out)).

And then there's Earth being within the habitable zone, of course. Mars and Venus are great examples of why it's impossible for an Earth-like planet to properly exist outside that zone: Venus has an atmosphere, but it's too close to the Sun, so all that extra heat has triggered so many eruptions on the surface that the atmosphere is mostly sulfuric acid—the most dangerous greenhouse gas, as well as the only one that can actually bake a world to extinction. Mars has evidence that it tried to form into a terrestroid, but since it's a bit too far from the Sun, the oxygen in its original atmosphere froze, fell to the ground in one way or another (probably in a snow-like fashion), bonded with the soil (which is part of why the soil is red), leaving behind a thin CO2 atmosphere.

Of course, I might've gotten some of those things wrong, but that's what my personal research turned up (except for the Pluto and Ceres counting as planets to me. That's just my personal opinion), so feel free to correct me on anything that isn't opinion based, since an opinion is just an opinion, and everyone is entitled to their own opinions.