Bit late to be giving feedback on 0.5.7 maybe, with 0.5.8 just around the corner, but I’m gonna do it anyway. I feel like as one of the more ‘meta aware’ people on the forums I still have useful things to add.
I am pleased to say that - for the first time since I started playing (0.3.2) - the game’s meta now has two equally viable competing strategies.
- The Fast Way: Stay as one hex. Change to something like a chemosynthesising proteins if you’re gonna be alive long enough for glucose despawning to matter. If you’re gonna speedrun just stay as cytoplasm.
- The Easy Way: Get enough hexes to support a chemoreceptor and use that to get enough resources to support your many hexes. For the exact type of support you can try chemosynthesis, or (imo the best) move to the surface to get photosynthesis. I haven’t tried doing it with iron yet.
I think this can be attributed to the very clever design decision to make chemoreceptors, by far the most OP organelle, too energy-intensive for a small bacterium to support.
Interestingly, my Auto-Evo algorithm seems to agree that chemoreception strat can compete with 1-hex. That’s weird, because the ingame auto-evo clearly doesn’t; 1-hex is still the only way to get a high population by the ingame auto-evo. Maybe I should start work on my auto-evo again…
Other than that I unfortunately find that predation is still not a useful strategy, and neither is anything that requires a lot of size (eukaryotes, for instance, are bad both in game and in auto-evo). I would recommend:
-
Find a way for predators to get more energy directly from their kill. In order to kill a resisting prey in Thrive you have to expend a tremendous amount of energy chasing him and producing toxin. Not only that, but once the chase is over you’ll find yourself 10 miles from the closes compound cloud. This makes predation suicidal. It’s simply not worth it to end up with a net loss of energy, all for some ammonia and phosphates you could have easily gotten from a cloud.
-
Put species in the list of things you can detect with a chemoreceptor. Chemoreceptors have finally made small multihex designs viable for autotrophs, but predators still have to rely on pure luck to find their prey.
-
Make Health scale with the size of the microbe. The larger a microbe is, the slower it is, the more food it needs, and the longer it takes to reproduce. What does it get in return? Nothing as far as I can tell. Making a 10-hex microbe just as easy to kill as a 1-hex one is unrealistic and really just adds insult to injury. In a game where players can design any creature they want, it’s important to put thought into the more abstract dimensions of design, instead of just basing everything on all-or-nothing divisons like prokaryote vs eukaryote. The rules of the game should make an equal amount of sense at 1-hex, 100 hexes, or a million hexes.
Multiplying Health by something like: 0.5 * sqrt(hexes), would be a good start.
Then some non-meta related stuff:
I’ve been thinking for a while about how Thrive’s environment doesn’t really seem to feel like a real space. I know that in theory I am in a coherent space, that I should be able to go back to clouds I’ve already visited, that other microbes should continue to exist when off-screen, etc.
But in practice I have a very hard time spatially orienting myself. It feels more like a mini-game (think flappy bird, or agar.io), where things are just sort of randomly put on your path. I think this comes down to 3 factors:
-
Clouds continue to spawn even in areas that are already explored. While object permanence is technically a thing in Thrive, it doesn’t feel that way: everytime you come back to an area there are new clouds there that couldn’t have logically gotten there. There is always this sense that some invisible hand is putting down the clouds just outside your vision.
-
The difference between a newly spawned cloud and one that has been there for a while is clearly visible. Newly spawned clouds are like separate circular droplets, while old clouds all blend together into this compound soup.
This prevents the world from feeling like a real lived-in thing. When I swim around in Thrive, I don’t feel like I’m exploring a world that already existed before I got there: I know what a Thrive world looks like when it’s existed for a while, and this is not it. Swimming around isn’t exploring, it’s just a little ritual you do to make more clouds spawn. -
The environment is very uniform. I know that realistically, these creatures are very small, but I still feel like there’s a distinct lack of larger scale structures. It would help a lot if you had to actually remember different places and where they were.
For example, maybe there could be a stone in the water, where lots of iron chunks spawn. Then somewhere else there’s, idunno, a droplet of dogpiss with lots of ammonia. Then if you wanted to get ammonia, instead of saying: “I know, I’ll swim in circles for 15 minutes straight until the game decides to spawn an ammonia cloud.”, you’d go: “I know , right now I’m by the stone, but a 2 minute swim to the south of here there’s that place with all the ammonia. Let’s go there!”
Anyway, those are just some thoughts for things that could be helpful to work on next. Overall I’d say this update has been one of the best for the meta of the game, but we still have a long way to go to make it feel like actual microbes in an ecosystem instead of just agar.io on steroids.