Currently, in Thrive, you always start with the same amount of MP, as it is a percentage: 100%. I propose that it could be possible to start with a lesser amount of MP for doing poorly within the gameplay section of thrive, having a grading system, another place where it is possible to have a 100%. Because this would be such a drastic change in the consequences of gameplay for Thrive, it may be a possibility that the effects of dying would have to have their effects on the population of a species reduced, lest the player die, then reproduce, then die next generation due to not being able to adapt as much as was necessary because they died the generation before, and then going extinct because they also lost population for that same reason. Of course, starting with a smaller amount of MP, below 70 percent, would lock off the nucleus, and below 50 would lock off membrane changes, but school grading systems also have a solution for this: retakes; If you get below a 50% as a grade, you failed, and if you get a failing grade, you can choose between either taking a retake, or skipping to the report section. If you were doing poorly in a patch, you would still be able to move out, but you would be unable to evolve, and auto-evo would still run, meaning the other species would likely increase in population, and evolve too. If the player chooses to take a retake, however, while the other species would still change population due to auto-evo, they would not evolve, in order to give the player a fair shot. Maybe if the player gets a grade below a certain amount, say, 80%, they could still choose to take a retake, but because they didn’t fail, they can still evolve if they want to. Still, the grading system is objectively a nerf, and without bonus points, it wouldn’t function as a buff, unless it were applied to auto-evo, where it could buff the player the same way a corset makes someone’s booty look bigger. As such, maybe on easy mode, the grading system could be just a cosmetic, and wouldn’t have any impact on gameplay. Alternatively, maybe the grading system isn’t linked to MP, and is instead used as an unlock condition for certain parts in the editor, maybe if the player gets a 100%, they get to immediately unlock all the parts, because they clearly know what they’re doing; This would only really work with the way upgrades currently work in Thrive, if there were more powerful things that had to be unlocked, then maybe those should stay locked.
Those would be the mechanics regarding the grading system once the grades were put in, but what about the grading system itself? In video games, grading systems are usually present in order to give players the “correct way to play,” which basically means whatever is cool and risky: If you’re playing in a slow way that isn’t very interesting, you’re going to get a bad grade because that’s not fun, you’re engaging in risk minimisation to avoid death. With those factors in mind, here are the 3 scores, or topics, that I have thought of in order to get the player to engage with the game. The 3 categories would all be percentages, which would then all be added together and divided by 3 in order to get the total score, and thus, the MP.
Time taken to reproduce
In order to be realistic, and assuming the grading system effects MP, the grading system should give a higher score to players who play in a way that would lend itself to evolution taking place faster, which would mean high reproduction rate: lots of reproducing, and in a short amount of time. In other words, if this were the only factor, speedrunning would be buffed, as all other strategies would be nerfed. In order to get the score, you could take a certain amount of time, which is either constant, or is based on expected amount of time to reproduce, and subtract that from the amount of time the player took. The percentage difference would then be subtracted from 100% to get the percentage score for how fast the player went. The time score would have subtracted from it the amount of deaths that the player took, where one death would be minus 10%, giving the player 10 deaths before completely failing the category. Although it wouldn’t be realistic, as evolution doesn’t really care about death, only reproduction (though this is less applicable since reproduction is directly linked to being alive for mitosis), this would probably equalize the strategies of being a big cell with a small population, and being a small cell with a large population, though likely not being implemented into auto evo.
Energy gained
Thinking about how auto-evo currently works in game, you could also add to the grading system amount of energy(atp) and potential energy(glucose, iron, etc.) gained(profited), which, similar to rings in sonic, would reset if you died; It would catalogue the ENTIRE amount of energy gained, not just what you end with.
AI score
The last score would be the AI score, which would grade the non-player cells on how well they did with the same system, and would encourage using the behavior tab to make functional cells instead of setting it to sessile so that none of you steals food from yourself.
Now, with this new grading system that hopefully balances the game and makes it more fun, it should be considered whether or not auto-evo would be able to utilize it. Currently, with the way auto-evo works, it would not be as simple as simply copy and pasting the code for the AI score on the grading system, as auto-evo does not use mutation points. However, something to consider is the fact that the grading system I have suggested is not entirely realistic: species only really evolve based on how fast they reproduce, and energy is only really a mechanism to do so. Because of this, maybe it would be best that, if auto-evo utilizes a grading system in some way, auto-evo would detect the reproduction speed of a cell, perhaps based on it’s size, and possibly speed, or perhaps still limiting the grading system to darwinian evolution, and prevent the AI from making changes based on its score. This would select against bigger species by preventing them from evolving as quickly, and thus making them more likely to die by being unadaptive. Of course, the question arises on how to prevent auto-evo from placing/removing parts, as it doesn’t use MP, but based on what I know about the code, the random amount of parts removed or gained could either be multiplied by the score, or be added to the score, then of course adjusting the numbers as necessary based on the expected range of the score for the desired cell size, or just the average one. This would only thin out ineffective large species, assuming the score properly takes into account how quickly a species would reproduce from factors other than size and speed, the two things larger species lack.
Of course, this is merely a side tangent, and I would be more open to discuss the player grading system, as that could be the player’s equivalent to the auto-evo system, because the player gets plot armor from the auto-evo system, and assuming the auto-evo system is built up, this plot armor may be too great for the player to have much difficulty, though assuming the auto-evo is fair, this plot armor may be removed, or adjusted based on the difficulty. It would likely be best for such a conversation on auto evo to have its own thread.