Speaking of the 2x speed mode, it might be just me butI feel like on weaker devices with this mode slime jets are more powerful than they should beβ¦
2 Likes
Do you have evidence of that? That sounds pretty bad if that is the case, as it would mean that for some reason the slime jets specifically are not properly taking elapsed game time into account (but seemingly everything else is as you didnβt mention any other problem).
4 Likes
I was only really paying attention to the jets.
On the 2x mode after pressing the slimejet button after the agent storage has been filled in my microbe moved to the edge of the screen at max zoomout for prokaryotes in like 1 to 2 frames, which might be faster than the speed at 1x mode but this could also be caused by the movement being rather jittery with the rather weak laptop Iβm using currently in combination with the 2x.
Edit: I noticed that if you go patch-extinct, select new patch, roll cursor over a species name, quickly move it to move to the patch button and press it and then quickly move it back to the selected species name, the cell preview of that species might not disappear from your screen.
2 Likes
I also noticed in one playthroughs if you get the βYou have Thrived!β message, have cheats enabled, press βPβ, and enter the editor fast enough, the next turn you spawn in the same biome, the βYou have Thrived!β message will still appear. If you can keep pressing the βPβ button and enter the editor fast enough for several turns, the βYou have Thrived!β message will continue to appear in those turns. The message does fade away eventually.
1 Like
I think it might be that the message can just persist through editor sessions since the game doesnβt expect you to get in the editor before it fades.
2 Likes
This is also what I am thinking.
1 Like
With the achievement for surviving 15 gens on normal+ I am not sure we need the message anymoreβ¦
Things could still happen after 15 generations that prevent players from reaching generation 20, so it makes sense to keep it.
1 Like
Also wouldnβt it get moved to multicellular soon?
1 Like
It would make more sense to move the message to Multicellular when development shifts to Multicellular, as the message helps to give a βfinalityβ to the Microbe stage. But we will see what the devs eventually decide to do.
3 Likes
Maybe there will be multiple messages, one a stage?
The intermediate βyou have Thrivedβ message will be removed once it is no longer useful. For example when multicellular is no longer a prototype. I donβt want to spend a bunch of time always moving the message. So I would just remove the thrived message entirely. Then the players can just go to the ascension prototype to see the real end of the game.
4 Likes
Isnβt that planned for the release of 1.0.0 or is the roadmap not up to date with that claim of itβs?
Is there a way for the βYou Have Thrived!β message to kept as an Easter egg within the game files?
2 Likes
Why would we keep it though? Thrive is opensource so itβs not like weβd have a datamining community or anything to find itβ¦
2 Likes
Yeah, even if the message was kept there would be no way to trigger it and thus nobody would see it. And if it needs like a mod to allow to trigger the message, the modder can anyway go back in git history to grab the old version of the message and put it back into the game.
3 Likes
Exactly. Though perhaps, the message could have a low chance to still pop up as an easter egg of sorts of the βold timesβ at gen20.
1 Like
What about having it as an achievement?
2 Likes
Well there already is one for living 15 gens, so that is close enough I think.
4 Likes
The auto-evolution does tend to disagree; in my experience it will usually suggest adding- say- at least one photosynthetic, chemosynthetic or ferrosynthetic part if thereβs an available resource. Since the evolutionary predictor effectively acts as βlivesβ, then even if itβs not too great per-cell, slapping it on tends to increase your resilience against deaths (assuming that the suggestions tend to reflect actual results). So perhaps adjusting the metrics instead of the parts would be successful?
Similarly, while you do get an advantage, it comes at a significant disadvantage in that it naturally confines your population. Given the current biomes tend to be quite stable, you donβt pay much of an evo-point cost to get Perfectly Adapted, but you do pay a significant cost in total population.
On top of that, the biggest cause of extinction in my experience is an adaptive radiation by another species- for example, a predatory or semi-predatory cell having to deal with toxins or cell walls all of a sudden. These tend to be confined to a single habitat at first when they do happen, from what I can tell, which means a specialist pays a double-whammy in being less likely to have backup habitats and having less room for error when they do so.
Implementing scaling modifiers or costs would be the most intuitive way to address that, to make sure itβs not a binary choice of βcan survive anywhere with enough points investedβ or βgets +10% buffs in one placeβ, but I could see other options. Perhaps βstrategic levelβ organelles or abilities, e.g a sporulation ability that lets you skip between biomes? (In theory you can do that just by moving some population and tanking the maladapted penalty until you get to a new biome, but that feels a bit gamey when thereβs no risk of population fission as far as Iβm aware).
Mmh, it would definitely be non-trivial. In my head it would basically just be simple rules like βif this is a thing that generates a resource, it costs 2 points of Ammonia rather than 1ββ¦ which is probably the sort of thing I could have a play around with myself, actually, since Iβve used Godot myself a bit before. Might mess with it and post it on the Steam Workshop if playing with game engine goes brrrrrrrrr, though I am notoriously flaky with such things.
Complexityβs definitely a reason to avoid making changes, ye. In this case, the specific gain being envisaged is that you effectively multiply your storage by the number of compounds you use, so it feels like βwastedβ space if you donβt- say- have at least one iron-metabolising compound, or if your iron-eater isnβt opportunistically gobbling up glucose-rich cells from all the cytoplasm. Basically, improving the gamefeel by having reasons not to hoard twenty micro-units of iron youβre never going to get any significant usage out of.
An alternative that might reduce the suggestionβs complexity could be a change to untyped storage space in your cell- either being ratio-based (so if you cell has X untyped storage with glucose, phosphate and ammonia, and adds iron, you go from being able to store X/3 glucose to X/4 glucose, which would require less player awareness but more balancing) or being a maximum resource storage (which might make per-moment resource balancing rather difficult without accompanying changes, such as organelles giving a hefty base storage for a given compound and using cytoplasm/untyped vacuoles for everything else).
If that particular implementation has been tried and failed, it makes sense not to re-add it. I do still think some form of βstasisβ organelle to make it less binary would be nice, however- for example, using an organelle to disable growth and reduce costs at the cost of some mucilage, something like that.
Ah, in that case it sounds like it could be an issue of communicating it to the player, rather than an issue of whatβs actually happening- I didnβt really notice any link between the oxygen, the glaciers, the iron and so on. Perhaps the planet screen having something to highlight the causative links would help? I know thereβs the graphs, but I suspect I identified it as βiron goes down because things are eating itβ rather than βiron goes down because oxygenβ, and the graphs screen tends to be one of the less used screens in my experience.
4 Likes