Adaptable generalists are going to be the most successful playstyle in basically every evolution stage. The better Thrive approximates real evolution, the more prominent this issue will be. You already see it in current Cell; a fast eukaryotic hunter will want to have chloroplasts as well, as they aren’t very cumbersome and provide extra glucose - up to the point where your entire glucose production is photosynthesis while you hunt exclusively for nutrients. (I don’t know if this is a phenomenon in the current version, but I fell into this theme basically every run last version.) It also used to be the case that auto-evo selected for species with every food source, although this has been mostly patched out. (Small cells still generally consist of a cytoplasm and two other food sources.)
To solve this, instead of applying balancing changes or modifying values, I suggest adding in ‘score’ instead. The more specialised you are, the more score you develop. Harder playstyles generate more score. Being a bottom-of-the-food-chain specialist would be very high-score. Score could be used for certain achievements, although people will probably want to make the number go up anyway.
Calculating score would be difficult and probably a problem for post-3.0.0 or post-7.0.0 devs.
This isn’t really a problem for auto-evo. Ideally, auto-evo will create generalists, but it will also create everything else.
1 Like
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
2
With dynamic gasses added, I’m fairly sure that photosynthesis is less viable for hunter lifestyles.
Dynamic gases was a buff, IMO. I’m still getting 40% oxygen patches, and that excess of efficiency means I really don’t need much glucose (or many mitochondria) at all to survive. (Still need the other compounds, though.)
1 Like
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
4
Do you still use photosynthesis on your hunter builds through?
I didn’t go for photosynthesis, but not because of any real issue with it. I just didn’t bother. Doing a new run, will see what happens.
1 Like
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
6
I wonder if we’ll ever see CO2 concentrations going down to near-real-life levels in Thrive, since at the present they are far higher than what we see in life…
The gas system clearly needs a lot more development. That’s just a fact. It’s arguably better than nothing, and I don’t think it’s worth prioritising over finishing the Microbe stage, but it’s definitely not in a publishable state. It’s better than it was in its first iteration, but… not by much, unfortunately. There’s still bizarre problems with gas diffusion and with oxygen generation that result in atmospheric holes and absurd oxygen levels.
I think it will eventually be done properly, though.
2 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
8
Hopefully by the end of multicellular development we’d have a far better “atmosphere system” (and probably a bunch of other systems too).