I’ve noticed that after just a few playthroughs of Thrive, its gameplay feels very flat, as it becomes a chore where you’re constantly placing the same parts in the same algorithm.
The problem is that there’s no strategic thinking here; you just place an organelle, and sometimes another organelle, and that’s it. The editor mechanics are quite flat. Compare this to Factorio, where you have to consider a large number of factors when designing: resource consumption, conveyor capacity, available space, etc. For Thrive, as a game where the editor is the core mechanic, this isn’t great news.
I think we should implement mechanics that would add strategic thinking and planning to the editor. For example, we could add the influence of a cell’s shape on its performance, as well as increase the influence of the environment on the cell.
You’re a little late, buddy
The cells shape effects Speed and Turning already.
Have you not noticed the tolerance thing?
By “completing” the single-cell stage, we meant completing the basic version of stage, not fully completing the development.
When was the last time you thought, “Hmm, maybe I’ll make my cell shape more geared toward speed rather than rotation” while designing a cell?
These are just sliders to be moved as conditions change. There’s no depth or strategy involved.
The pressure slider seems pretty strategic at least as long as you do move up and down in the water column.
I am not sure what you meant, but for us in the development team it means all guaranteed development time from our main programmer goes towards Multicellular, apart from bugs in the Microbe Stage. Anything beyond that is limited to whatever volunteers like myself can cook up.
For balance changes, that is (relatively) easy to do. But big overhauls are increasingly unlikely.
So as stated, the cell’s shape does affect its performance. And the environment can have a very large influence on the cell. (Take light, for example)
So I am afraid you’re going to have to be much more specific.
I think they mean that all this influence stuff generally tends to drift in one direction (for example, you are always going to be increasing your uv resistance for example and never make it lower), which means there is “in truth” less depth of what you should do with your cell that what might it seem like.
I am not sure if this is what they meant, but I do happen to do agree that this is not ideal, and it seems like the kind of thing I can try to balance myself at some point. But I also think it is not high priority right now.
Yeah, the development phase of microbe stage is basically over now. We aren’t promising any new major features for it.
Of course I can’t predict how many volunteers want to keep working on it, and doing community feature suggestions. And of course how skilled those people are will also limit how big reworks they can do, because they will have to be able to do the whole thing themselves and testing to verify they haven’t broken anything. So that is a much higher bar now for future work on the microbe stage than before. Because what I don’t want to have to happen is to just constantly need to jump back to the microbe stage to clean up somebody’s mess, so I’ll require very good quality changes if someone wants to change a major part of the microbe stage.
I still do hope at least the tolerances can be made more engaging than what they are like currently.
Tolerances, amongst other things, effect much more than just the Microbe stage (multicellular, macropscoic, and later creatures can likely keep adjusting them). I think some of the wider effecting features will continue to be tweaked.
Is there any microbe stage specific feature in need of being tweaked that doesn’t also apply to the later stages?
Microbe Auto-Evo to make more interesting cells. Related to this, better balance of the Nucleus. Though that is also partially so that Microbe Stage can better lead into Multicellular Stage.
From my observeations autoevo still struggles with making eukaryotes viable outside of the radiation miche.
Really? In my experience I’ve seen eukaryotes evolve before I do.
Do you play on the standard settings?
So I do think there are areas of improvement when it comes to diversity of experience and replayability. But I do think the significant portion of this can be introduced through balancing changes.
It is very likely that the design team will continue to try out different things when it comes to balancing. It is possible but less likely (in a timely manner that is) that small tweaks from programming volunteers continue to be implemented. And it is very unlikely that there is a missing mechanic or something that we implement for the Microbe Stage solely.
I also wouldn’t discount the impact of features that are by their nature a source of continuous improvement - in particular, auto-evo and AI. Getting auto-evo to churn out more diverse builds, and making sure these builds know how to use their abilities, would dramatically beneficial to replayability.
The thing is those autoevo improvements would have to come before we move on to macroscopic no?
Auto-evo is ultimately a heuristic which produces random results, so there’s a lot of experimentation and variables that go into it. We cannot reliably recreate every possible result of auto-evo, so it will inherently be something that is reviewed, tweaked, and adjusted with time. A good goal is to make sure everything is readable by auto-evo, but even with that, we will need to tweak things to make sure enough diversity is present.