The multicellular stage is very fun, but also extremely hard.
I’ve run into several noticeable issues when trying to make a predatory animal in the new update; Firstly, the drawback to speed is quite massive and cannot be offset with flagellum without starving the creature at higher cell counts, before it is fast enough to catch up to prey items.
I recall adding enough flagellum to barely enable active predation, but there was not enough glucose in the creatures of the ecosystem to keep the creature fed; I recall slaughtering 20 and the organism still starved instantly afterwards. There was a large variety of different sized organisms in large populations, so the ecosystem itself wasn’t the issue. The main issue seems to be that the slowness scales up faster with added cells than the flagella add speed, so in order to keep up with the speed decreases, you need vastly more flagella than is affordable to maintain.
After abusing saving and loading, no matter what i tried i found myself unable to keep the organism consistently fed beyond 3 or so extra cells. i’m not sure what was creating the energy drain as the organism had a massively positive ATP score as a single cell, which should have gotten even more efficient after multicellularity. Instead the efficiency now seems to dip, with legal energy amounts causing almost instant death when growing extra cells.
On a different note, one major issue i have with the editor is that i’m not sure how to delete cells, or set the order in which cells are grown. I consider these both important capabilities because more than once i found the ecosystem changing around me and necessitating removal of placed cells, replacement by better cell types that I developed, or changing when certain cells are grown.
There was a moment in the gameplay where my organism was too slow in it’s infant stage to catch any prey, because the order in which the cells were grown started with stem cells instead of movement cells. This meant that as the original prey items got faster over time, my organism couldn’t adapt to catch them when young, and therefore went extinct (it wasn’t viable to edit the stem cells because the cost of movement to get fast enough was only affordable if a small percentage of cells had extra flagella)
One thing I hope to see more of is other multicellular species developing in the environment so that multicellular predators can fill their glucose storage semi-regularly; Right now, even with the most glucose efficient setup i could devise, with very few hexes per cell, the organism is at glucose deficit inside of a thriving ecosystem of bacteria.
As for bugs i encountered, a notable one was the inability to engulf when starving, which meant that quite a few times my large engulfment-based organism died despite food being available, which is annoying when it takes so long to grow them into a behemoth.
Another noticeable bug is the fact that the cell spawning can be a bit wonky at times, leading to strange shapes quite often which reduce your creature’s effectiveness. i would liken it to a genetic mutation/deformity, but it happens pretty much every time at larger cell counts.
overall, i’m very excited to play more multicellular gameplay and look forward to designing many complex forms that utilize interesting cell synergy. However for now, predatory builds seem a bit bugged or unbalanced, as the resource extraction from the environment is somehow less efficient than as a single cell. The slowdown seems a bit too harsh for now, meaning that i have to repeatedly quit and load in order to find the right balance usually losing the game 12 or so times in a row.