What are these like? (Never played that series)
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Even though they weren’t cannibals, they had a predilection (I need to use this word more often) for sacrificing their own people and other life as a solution to problems.
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I suppose that would describe what I meant.
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If tutorials are off, the “Volatile Beginnings” option is enabled by default, providing greater diversity in the beginning of the game. By enabling “Volatile Beginnings”, compounds and resources vary - besides oxygen, and the natural behavior of glucose - making players not stick to the same script on their first steps, and making them mix things up depending on what is available to them nearby. Within a couple of generations, iron, sulfur, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, ammonia and phosphate, etc. can go from abundant to gone in a patch. Environmental events, such as volcanic eruptions and meteor impacts, can also be much more abundant in those first few turns.
This sounds like a great idea! Also, it appears that a version of the experimental settings dynamic compounds would be used for the first few turns in a game, correct?
Beyond that, if there’s something easy to implement which can make sulfur more engaging, that could be very worthwhile for a volunteer to pursue. Photosynthesis is unique because it has a schedule, iron is unique because it is intertwined by chunks, and glucose will always be prioritized because it’s the most important resource in Thrive; what’s so special about hydrogen sulfide? It doesn’t have to be purely a unique mechanic as well - we can make it behave uniquely as a dynamic compound for example.
Aren’t Iron-Sulfur clusters important for the ETC? Also, Sulfur is important for Disulfide bonds in proteins, and Sulfate can be used as an electron acceptor for Hydrogen Oxidation in Hydrogenase.
So that is something that I think we should atleast playtest. Instead of there being an oxygen slider, just display your oxygen tolerance value, based on your part selection, and make players tweak their organism that way.
How about instead increasing the MP cost for the Oxygen slider, so it is much more difficult to suddenly get large changes in Oxygen Tolerance?
Size-Related Costs
This is probably the one completely new mechanic on here that I strongly argue we should implement. There’s a reason later down this post, but for the nucleus, we can tie some sort of benefit to size-related costs, thus making it an interesting decision to make; after a certain size as a prokaryote, adding the nucleus just makes sense in minimizing the marginal energy loss on size.
I like the idea of a size-related costs, which could tie into minimizing Surface Area-to-Volume ratio that was discussed in another topic.
Auto-Evo Variety for Abilities and Membranes
Making it more likely for auto-evo to evolve different membranes and abilities would do great things for interactions with AI.
I like this idea, but the mutation rate would have be sure not to change too many things at once. Traits do need to be passed on and kept because their are beneficial. When playing with highest mutation rates, organisms can gain and then lose/change their membrane type after one turn. In real life, we have not seen a Fungi suddenly lose their characteristic Chitin membrane.
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For the first point, I can suspect it will be difficult to have the patches behave like how proposed, possibly this will be as hard to implement as the snowball event.
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I think getting rid of the Oxygen Slider is a good idea. That or speeding up how quickly oxygen builds up, and also greatly limiting the max slider tolerance and increasing the cost of it.
I also think the size-related costs could be interesting. However, I think the game should encourage a species or two to be big enough to engulf the player. I think the last time I saw something bigger than myself was in 6.7. Grant it, I have had several occasions when I had just divided and something else was close to dividing and ate me, but have seen nothing that could regularly eat me in some time. I hope size-related costs, which would certainly make the players choices more meaningful, don’t discourage cells from even reaching the players size.
This is a good point.
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Wouldn’t that encourage the players to go above the size where such species can engulf the player? Or is the “player engulfer” niche always available?
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The idea is a niche for a very large size the player is unlikely to reach, more so if there were size-related costs, the question being how those two might work together. From a perspective of “the player gets too big” I think size-related costs could help. But from the perspective of “the AI doesn’t get big enough” they might hurt. What if AI ends up staying smaller than they already do, and there are even less situations when they eat the player? For the player, size-related costs could be a good thought provoking/balancing mechanic, and giving such a limit ONLY to the player and not the AI would be unfair, but if it ends up making the AI less likely to reach a dangerous size . . . I am just not sure. Though it is certainly worth thought/discussion.
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Also when exactly would this size-related cost be implemented considering we’re in the last few months of microbe stage development?
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