AI and Time Limit Difficulty Setting

[Poodelicus (Crazy, Curious, and Stubborn)]

I am putting this in Aware Stage because I know our current Dev team cannot afford to give time to this right now.

There has been a lot of discussions under various topics about:

• Whether or not the AI should be allowed to pass the player or not
• Whether or not the AI passing the player should automatically be a game over
• Whether or not the game should have a Time Limit

There seems to be a lot of people who favor that realism means time limits and having to keep up with the AI. However, the wiki (What is Thrive) states:

"Progression through the stages is not necessarily an objective of the game. We do not want to compel the players towards progressing past a stage of gameplay they may be enjoying at the time, thus there will generally be no penalizations to the player for remaining in the same stage for an extensive period of time. "

Personally, I feel that the AI passing you should make the game more difficult, but you should be aloud to try to overcome those difficulties and catch up. Which doesn’t fall into either of the two. So, while this would likely be difficult to program, I suggest, at a later point, when Thrive has more Developers, Funding, and Popularity, that the AI and Time Limit be given there own Difficulty Settings.

• Easy: You may take as long as you like, your sun will never die, and the AI will never pass you Up.
• Normal: The AI can pass you up, but will slow down its progression a little, giving you time to try to catch up, though you will have to overcome extra things like: the AI polluting the ocean and having weapons. Also, the time limit for your sun will start at a later stage, like Social, when your species can actually look at it.
• Hard: If the AI passes you up, you lose. The time limit for your sun will be set from the get go.
• (Edit) Custom: Set the AI setting and the Sun Time Limit independently of each other.

As a future mechanic, which should not be a priority at this stage in development, this would allow for a more diverse variety of play, both holding to the Wiki and to Realism (albeit on different settings). What do you think?

[hhyyrylainen]

Related thread about the overall time limit:

Game Time Limit?

I don’t know if this is the right place to put this, but I was wondering if there will be a point in the game when the planet’s sun will die? Or will it be like Spore and the planet and sun will live indefinitely? I know our own sun will live for another 5 billion years but Earth will only be inhabitable for another 1 billion. In my Vaotes game I am set to enter multicellular at 3,300 Myr, and I’m a little nervous that there wouldn’t be much time for the rest of the stages when they come out. I …

I partially replied to this idea in the quick questions thread before I saw this separate thread opened:

Quick Question Thread

This is why time limits, I think, need to be tied to the difficulty mode. The AI being in danger of advancing past you should be a fun condition to try to combat against (and probably should be disabled entirely in easy mode). The reason why I’m very against even trying to make the game work is exactly this: It would be an absolute nightmare to design the game simulation, performance, and program being able to make this work in any other way than just declaring the game to be over. If we put…

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Seems like a good compromise between science and game experience.

[AnthropocenianAge (AnthropocenianAge Arthropleura wants to give you a hug!)]

I am curious as to how this would be handled with Custom Difficulty settings. I normally play with Custom Difficulty settings, so does this mean the AI over taking me (the Player) does not apply?

[Poodelicus (Crazy, Curious, and Stubborn)]

I presume, if this was to be implemented, that custom would let you choose to set AI and the Sun Time Limit separately from each other and from other things that the 3 main settings would effect. Though again, this is a far future thing, after Thrive gets into aware stage and has the resources, manpower, and player activity to be worth doing this for.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Every difficulty setting would most likely be changable in the advanced difficulty settings.

[thriveuser1454 (Occasional Thrive Player)]

Yeah, Custom difficulty just means you get to fiddle around with the internal parts of the difficulty. If AI overtaking the player/time limits were implemented, they’d be sliders in the settings, so Custom would mean you’d just get to choose where those are.

Honestly, I think the solar time limit isn’t actually worth it to implement, for the simple reason that it doesn’t make mechanical sense to me. If it would be accurate to real life, then it would become exponentially less important every new stage. Microbe moves in 100myr steps - later stages will probably move in 10myr, or 1myr, or even 100kyr steps. Each step down on the quickness in this way will make the sun that much less important, which means it would only be a pressing concern through the game if you really screw up in the Microbe stage and run down the time limit.

On the other hand, solar change has a demonstrable effect on the planet over time, so solar time influencing the planet would be somewhat important on the realism front.

Overall, I don’t think it’s significant. The sun boiling your planet alive should just be a side street on the road map.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

It still should be implemented in some way since we must follow the scientific theory, too.