Cooling a planet: lower solar affect, raise albedo, lower greenhouse. As it cools, ice will naturally cause it to cool even further, so this has a bit of a perpetuating effect, but can be overcome pretty easily by swinging the settings the other way. I did end up with a 2 billion year ice age once though, because I let things cool off too much.
More land requires volcanic eruptions, plus plate tectonics. I believe more core heat will force the plates to push harder, leading to more dramatic mountains faster. It's still slow on a evolutionary time scale though, so if I want to do serious land transformation, I'll either do the events myself or kill everything off with heat or cold and go back to geologic for a bit. A few billion years will get you at least a few island chains going.
Ice lowers the sea level a bit... you still need to have the shallow areas, but if you have some, then cooling things off slightly is a way to get more land.
Extreme heat will eventually cause the oceans to boil off into the atmosphere, and given time, that will tend to dissipate as well, giving you plenty of deserty goodness to play with, although you have to either add more water or get it back out of the atmosphere somehow, and let things cool down before you can start life again.
I'm still not sure ALL of the effects of the atmosphere sliders, but I know the sliders are the best way to try to do a lot of things, rather than brute forcing it with the edit abilities. Still not sure what core formation does in the geology, and only vaguely know what to do with the biosphere sliders, but they can have a dramatic effect, depending on how much life you have on your planet.
Again, this is all from the SNES version. PC version might differ slightly.
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Topic: Oh boy... I miss Sim Earth! (Read 3991 times)