Imagine you’re playing an RPG and you have a choice: take an axe or a sword. The axe deals less damage, while the sword can also parry. You’d probably take the sword, because the axe is inferior in every way. You’d agree that this is very poor game design.
And this is exactly what the choice between chemosynthesis and chemolithotrophy looks like in Thrive.
Iron is more abundant than hydrogen sulfide
Chemolithotrophy is the most efficient energy source early in the game (six rustiniacins can support a nucleus)
Chemolithotrophy doesn’t require additional transformations or organelles (meaning it requires fewer hexes and, therefore, less osmoregulation costs)
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
2
To be fair there is a consistent source of h2s in the waters while iron may not be replenished so easily, especially once oxygen accumulates. So h2s might be more viable long-term.
Iron was attempted to be nerfed in the last patch, but people complained that it was useless strategy then, so the nerf was undone (if I remember right). And that was the only piece of feedback on iron (and chemosynthesis hadn’t received any recent balance feedback) since the last release.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
4
Oh so iron will be even more powerful than what domin2ktr termed it as here. I suppose it would still fall off long term, though few would remain in microbe stage by that point.
The problem with iron is . . . your own species can force you away from your source with sheer numbers, and sources can be far apart. H2 appears to me to be in more place, albeit in smaller amounts at each. For h2, you are meant to keep moving, while for Iron, you are meant to build up your supply at one source so you can survive the long trip to find another source when the success of your species ends up leading you to be crowded away from the first source.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
6
…Are we sure a species can go extinct from this kind of overcrowding with eachother?
It is my understanding that the player starving does more to negative the species than other members starving. If the player is crowded away from the food source and killed enough times, wouldn’t that be game over?
That actually does bring up a good point though. Intraspecies competition is not really implemented outside of that right now. How should the game handle the species is thriving but the player is not beating other members of the species?
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
8
Of course with what we have but I’m not sure we should have the player “be so successful it’s detrimental” at times…
I think proper implementation of intraspecies competition could make it less of a problem, but that competition, in the state it is, is half the counterbalance for iron. That and being more storage dependent that sulfur eaters.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
10
To be fair you could just set your species to be sessile and never have a problem after again, as long as you can avoid dying atleast.
They are not “aggressive”, shear mass pushes others around. You can use “Stay away from me” pheromones, but then more of your species starves than necessary.
I think this happens very often if one has a Chemoreceptor set to Iron. I can usually get Iron without overcrowding, as overcrowding does not tend to happen without having a Chemoreceptor. Probably because I have yet to see AI species naturally evolve the Chemoreceptor, even thought it was implemented in 0.9.0.0.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
13
At the other hand without a chemoreceptor you can’t find iron yourself as easily.
When playing as a chemosynthesizer, I felt a huge shortage of hydrogen sulfide; my not-so-large eukaryotic cell (30 hexes or so) could eat up a whole cloud of sulfur and use it up in a few seconds, while there were orders of magnitude fewer sulfur clouds in the locations than, say, iron.
Because of this, playing through chemosynthesis was unbearable (I had to load the game several times because I was extinct)
For comparison: I used chemolithotrophy to achieve multicellularity in 9 generations(less then 1 billion in game years) at high complexity and without a single death.
As chemolithotrophic eukaryote you can easily adopt semi-predatory lifestyle eating smaller prokaryotes that simply get in your way, which will provide you enough energy to survive for minutes without iron, or use thermosynthesis, as temperature is high in volcanic vents where large amounts of iron is usually found.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
18
I think chemosynthesis is generally meant for prokaryotes and it’s not really intended to be used by eukaryotes.