At some point, I’d like to see some sort of fast-track added to Thrive. There’s two different cases that I consider this solving:
Playing a sessile organism is very boring. When you’re an inactive plant, you don’t do anything. Yet preventing the player from playing this by having it be boring is a bit weird for Thrive. Thus, the first form of evo fast-track would allow a sessile organism to effectively skip past the long waiting period. This would probably entail a tickspeed slider, possibly to an extreme degree, allowing you to evolve a tree at the cost of losing most of the gameplay loop, which still disincentivises it.
I can easily imagine a situation in which the player finds themself evolving faster than the auto-evo, to the point where they colonise land only to find very limited habitable environments. To prevent the player being limited to the shoreline, I’d suggest a generation skipper, allowing a stable species to skip a run and species editor to let the auto-evo catch up. (This could be implemented as a subtler method of just setting the auto-evo to be more aggressive when it’s falling behind the player, and perhaps to be less aggressive when the player’s behind, effectively implementing racing-game rubberband AI into Thrive.)
Are there any other use cases for various methods of making evo run faster?
1 Like
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
2
I’m not sure if there is an easy way to change autoevo’s aggresiveness mid-game without major code changes…
Isn’t this thread more about just skipping a generation from the player side with a button? So like there’d be some way on entering the editor to decide to let auto-evo run twice (or even more) instead of once. That way the AI species evolve way faster than normal.
I’d say maybe some extra MP. You skip one round, and get, say, 25 or 50 MP. (Even just 1 would be great. I keep running into 16 MP on Easy, which is exactly enough to achieve nothing.)
You could implement some sort of mini-run sandbox for this sort of auto-evo step-skipping. You get to enter the world with reproductive compounds full, so you can exit the run at any time. However, you can still collect and use reproductive compounds, and the meter has a second level so that you can see how difficult it is to get to reproductive level in this world state. Reproducing doesn’t have a population impact on your species, but neither does dying, so it’s basically just a free-roam sandbox to interact with auto-evo’s ecosystems.
Giving extra MP (or really a discount as MP is a percentage so giving more than 100% doesn’t make sense) would just mean that in effect nothing changed. If the AI is given two auto-evo cycles and then the player gets a 50% MP discount, that’s just increasing the step size of each evolution, but doesn’t affect the relative progress between the AI and the player.
2 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
8
Should the player have any sort of control over this or should all the decisions be made by algorithms?
1 Like
Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
9
This was never really clear to me, is it referred to as a percentage anywhere in the game? I skip tutorials so I might have just not seen it, but it might make sense to add in a percent sign to it’s use or measurement or something.
Maybe an option to focus on killing different species or something? Best bet would be to lean on miches or add some real use for the behavior tab.
I think something contributing to all the suggestions for more Mutation Points is that they are called ‘Points’, implying they are an arbitrary score.
They should probably just be renamed to ‘Mutation Percentage’ so this doesn’t have to keep being explained.
Those who know, know, everyone else can be told “akshually it’s a percentage”
It would be just useless visual clutter if the percentage symbol was included everywhere, like it would in most cases increase displays from 3 to 4 character widths, that’s a huge increase.