While the current division of stages are quite a good framework, the strict linear arrangement presents as a Lamarckian march of complexity which does not fit an evolution game. I feel it could be good to add more stages off to the side for alternate routes to sapience
My ideas are:
Protozoa Stage: Instead of immediately becoming multicellular, microbes could instead evolve into more advanced cells similar to Paramecium and such. The Protozoa Stage could be held as an alternative to the early Multicellular Stage, with Protozoa progressing directly to the late Multicellular Stage upon becoming multicellular
Colonial Stage: This stage is reached by evolving a modular organism in Aware and late Multicellular Stages. From here you can progress the same as in Aware Stage
Hive Stage: This would be where non-sapient (or non-technological) species start forming clusters large enough to be considered Society Centres. Upon achieving sapience and/or technologically advancing theyâd go directly to the Society Stage
Apocalypse Stage: If you fail hard enough in Industrial or Space Stage, youâll go back to an alternate version of Awakening, retaining access to some of your technologies (i.e. social developments and philosophies/science). From there you can return to Society Stage and continue on
How? From a quick search it seems that protozoa are just âadvancedâ single cellular eukaryotes. So by definition once they start forming bigger organisms by sticking together, they would enter early multicellular stage. So protozoa would be just a bunch of extra detours you could take through the microbe stage if you wanted to play it longer.
Whatâs a modular organism? If it is not plausible for evolution to cause such a thing to emerge, then itâs not going to be in the game.
Iâm too lazy to look them up but Iâm nearly certain that this has been discussed here on the forums before. And the conclusion is that stuff like bees and ants exist on Earth so it is a candidate for stuff to be added to the aware stage. But as it is not on the main path to the end of the game itâs a lower priority thing than other stuff to do. So it might eventually make it into the game but it will be years and years unless someone who really likes the feature takes the time to spearhead the feature development for it.
I think what they are describing is either something like bees/ants/wasps, or something like cellular slime molds(but multicellular units), but they are kinda unclear.
But then later in that post there was the âColonial Stageâ part which is clearly about bees and stuff like that. So why would the same point be made twice but with different names?
Modular organisms are things like Bryozoa and Siphonophores, with multiple bodies connected and working as one entity
Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
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I think the current understanding of how thrive is going to work has a huge gap the shape of colonial creatures like Bryozoa and Siphonophores, and no one has proposed a good idea to get it working. Iâm not praising burgeonblas here, âremember to make it workâ isnât a good idea to make it work, sadly. Secondly, using the gameplay from society stage to control eusocial creatures is a great idea! I think itâs been proposed before, likely by me, and itâs the obvious way to get a gameplay system for something that isnât too high priority. I think eusocial creatures should be able to progress technologically, but I have a different issue. These shouldnât be stages! Thatâs kinda silly. Protozoa arenât so much more advanced and cool that they need a stage, the idea shown is just spending your time optimizing in cell stage before rushing ahead, itâs overkill. Same with all the other options. The game should be able to change drastically when you have certain rate abilities, they donât need to be whole stages.
I feel that stages would be a major way the game acknowledges progress, and hence they should be set up to acknowledge and hold up all progress that a player could make, not just progress along the âdefaultâ axis of progress
What sense does it make that making a worm-like animal is most of the way through the Multicellular stage, but making a nigh-identical worm-like protozoa is no progress at all? Or that constructing a city is only progress if you can also make an axe?
On top of this is the fact that the game is supposed to be about evolution, and it seems that a branching/non-linear stage arrangement would be better for representing that than a direct linear progression