i mostly like the game but there are a bunch of little things i find annoy me.
Adding proteins/organelles to cytoplasm costs as much as adding them to the exterior, there are plenty of reasons to add them to the cytoplasm, and i shouldn’t feel penalized for it
Removing the Protein means removing the cytoplasm even if that means putting a hole in the cell
Proteins should be upgradeable into Organelles, currently need to remove the protein which costs extra points and just feels punishing.
Pilus is the only defense Auto-evo ever adds, and there aren’t many ways of dealing with spikes if they add it to their tail engulfing them becomes much harder, and i have to rely on trapping them
My own Species often feels like they are competing with me, but my death ultimately hurts them, i don’t want to use signaling because they will just eat what i wanted to eat.
given point 4 and 5 many defensive measures only show up in the system as offshoots of my own species making it a negative thing to add toxins and the like as it just means i’ll have to fight it later rather than just easily engulfing on prey.
the lysosome should probably be able to create a protein to neutralize toxins. needed to advance the evolutionary arms race.
lysosome overall feels pretty unnecessary, AI rarely experiments with alternative membrane types so i don’t need a lysosome to help break them down, digestion is never so slow that i have issues with ATP production. and if i digest too fast i can end up overflowing which can be a negative if valuable prey is few.
AI species rarely produce real medium size (or large) bacteria, the bigger i grow the harder it is to find bigger prey, and AI never ends up creating predators for me unless i deliberately hold myself back.
6 Likes
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, you don’t have to remove the proteins once you become eukaryotic. And they’re already required to unlock certain eukaryotic organelles.
On discounted parts added to an already placed cytoplasm, I see what you mean and that could be something to look at. Some weird cases would probably emerge though (if placing a 2 part-organelle on 1 cytoplasm, does a discount apply?). Deleting organelles leaving behind cytoplasm though can be a bit of a bother, as perhaps players want to remove the cytoplasm as well. That would result in much more MP being spent in an editor trip, with twice the number of deletions atleast to achieve the same thing.
Having an option to upgrade proteins directly into organelles is problematic because of the different hex counts. If a metabolosome, which takes up 1 hex, is close to the nucleus, is surrounded on all sides, and is upgraded, where is the mitochondria going to fit? It is intentional that the process of streamlining your eukaryote from its prokaryotic structure takes several generations, but I do agree there is a jankiness there which could be polished. Perhaps a discounting on eukaryotic parts for a few turns after the nucleus is placed.
Your own species can often prevent you from consuming resources. I think part of this is the fact that sometimes, your own species spawns too much in proportion to other organisms, meaning you’re much more likely to bump into them than anything else, and thus, compete with them. Those are of course dynamics we want to see in some form in Thrive - internal competition and overcrowding are important evolutionary pressures - but overcrowding can happen too frequently in Thrive, and we don’t offer a means to represent internal competition.
Predation as a whole can be made to require more adaptations; it’s pretty easy to transition from a non-predatory to predatory organism without any specific adaptations. We’ve previously had an issue where predation was very unrewarding; now, the opposite can happen, where predation can be very easy to stumble into. I think balancing lysosomes or engulfment storage stats could help with this a bit.
I know what you mean with the auto-evo defaulting to pilus placement, and see room for improved diversity. Part of the issue is also that some new abilities were also not hooked up to the AI, so even if auto-evo was more proactive with different forms of abilities, cells wouldn’t necessarily know how to use their tools.
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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
Isn’t there supposed to be a major upgrade done to in-game microbe AI once terrain is added to certain microbe patches?
AI for the terrain would definitely have to be handled. AI as a whole needs to be prioritized eventually, but an entire integration of every new part isn’t necessitated by terrain generation.
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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
Still I recall Hhyyrylainen saying that if AI doesn’t get updated for terrain generation, it will become very easy for players to notice that it hasn’t been keeping up with new content…
I am not sure how easy it would be to program, but I think the most "realistic"approach would be for a system that recognizes when two metabolosomes or a metabolosome and a cytoplasm are adjacent. I have thought for some time replacing 2 adjacent metabolosomes with a mitochondria taking up the same two hexes should be cheaper, and I hope such a system eventually gets programmed, though I understand that with the current lack of manpower, prioritizing of features is in order.
3 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
8
Yeah, and probably such a “simple” feature could turn out to be really difficult to program without bugs.
Agreed. And I also agree with the Dev’s desire to reach Aware Stage sooner. That being said, the fact that “upgrading” two adjacent Metabolosomes into a Mitochondria is less efficient than creating a new Mitochondria from scratch is just plain strange. Perhaps the Dev’s will come up with an alternative to what I suggested, and perhaps it is in the games best interest they wait a few years to attempt to implement whatever solution they come up with, but it is an issue that should probably be addressed at some point.
Also:
Perhaps either A: a discount in replacing a part with a cytoplasm, or B: reduction in deletion costs of non-cytoplasm, in case the player then wants to delete the resulting cytoplasm.
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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
Could be since by that time Thrive should get a larger audience, also giving a larger picture of what problems lie inside the game…
That, and they would have more people to work on more things at once. I think, for multiple reasons, it is inevitable that the microbe stage will get a few things rebalanced, have a few features added, and have a few bugs fixed once things have picked up. I just hope the weird “upgrading is more expensive than just adding” issue is one of the things that gets addressed eventually.
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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...?)
12
Exactly. I think right after aware is completed, we could get an overall update for things in need of action in microbe and multicellular.
Couldn’t you just change the MP deletion costs so the cost of deleting an organelle and the cytoplasm it sits on is equivalent to the current cost of deleting the organelle?
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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...?)
14
That would require making changes to allow cytoplasm to occupy the same slot as an another organelle. Which probably isn’t happening with the current roadmap.
No, the idea is that when you delete an organelle it places cytoplasm where it was.
Right now, deletion price is 10 MP* in the cell stage. You spend 10 MP to remove a part; let’s say it’s hydrogenase. In my proposal, when you’re deleting that hydrogenase, you only spend 5 MP, and you are left with a cytoplasm. The cytoplasm also costs 5 MP to delete, so in total, it costs the same amount to remove the hydrogenase the way you would have before the implementation of the hypothetical feature.
*8 MP in my runs, but I play with 0.8 mutation cost normally.
This could come with an attendant change of making parts cheaper to place on preexisting cytoplasm. In my runs, cytoplasm is 17 MP and a metabolosome is 40 (I think). My metabolosome would cost 40 MP to place on an empty hex, but if there was cytoplasm there, it would only cost 23 MP.
the way i think of it, when you place a protein or organelle on an empty space you would pay the cost of the protein +the cost of the cytoplasm Membrane in which it inhabits (you expanded the cell it needs more membrane and proteins at least are still surrounded by cytoplasm), the base costs of organelles would be reduced to reflect this change and not drive costs through the roof. your hypothetical in this case is solved by the fact that you would pay for the cytoplasm membrane separately. as for removing, i like what Poodelicus suggested, you delete the protein or organelle and in the same turn you can choose to delete the cytoplasm in that spot for free.
you can currently place that organelle in cytoplasm for no additional cost, do the same thing for this. place a mitochondria you can put it directly on the metabolosome, and it just replaces it, player correctly would see this function as evolving the protein into an organelle, you could add an additional discount to further encourage players into this behavior.
its less of a transition more just a natural function of getting bigger, that said this isn’t what needs fixing, just a few balance changes, less storage granted by Organelles that aren’t vacuoles or cytoplasm. and also make the AI better at developing countermeasures or becoming predators to the player, would help the non predatory playstyle. if Ai starts to pick up silica, calcium, Cellulose or Chitin membrane that immediately bumps Lysosomes up my priority list (the one time i saw the AI do this i immediately popped a Nucleus so i could grab a lysosome for it, was very disappointed that species went extinct).
could also be that the higher level membranes (Calcium and silica, and to a lesser extent doubble) are more resistant to metabolism, you won’t break them down fast enough as a predator unless you get a Lysosome. this is also where Bioluminescence might come into the equation, Bacteria Bioluminesce to attract predators and then feed off the predator. in thrive you would simply have to outlast the cell that engulfed you and then feast on its remains.
engulfing should probably also slow a cell down as it added a bunch of mass that it didn’t have before. often engulfing in the current game results in a speed boost as you are suddenly filled with celular fuel. Digestion could possibly cost ATP itself, not enough to kill the cell just enough the represent the slowdown due to increased mass. being lean should mean being faster too, maybe a longer shrint if your not currently digesting anything.
wait a minute, didn’t i start this thought process by suggesting devs dont need to slave away many more man hours on this feature? belgium, i agree with the Idea that Thrive has got to finish up monocellular stage and move on up the evolutionary ladder. whatever can be done relatively fast in this regard maybe do it, if it would take a hot minute, pass, simply fixing up the AI auto-evo will throw the predation Balance out of whack in a good way, and that’s not optional at this point.
I agree with the thought about internal competition, but it also doesn’t seem very rewarding to engage in Cooperation is the issue. if i gather the posse to hunt, it can slow us all down, and only one cell gets to eat, often the one not me, so even if cooperation is fruitful overall, the game wont give me a good score because my cell died as a result. Binding is a pretty mixed bag too, but at least its a microcosm of the Multicellular evolution and thus should benefit from many improvements to that feature indirectly. to put it mildly Evolution isn’t kind to species that find a way to slow down their own reproduction, Just look at the Decline in Panda populations.
3 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
17
That is a good solution… Assuming the developers consider this important enough to be added in.
You mean for the cytoplasm “cell part”?
An another take would be that you “sacrifice” 2 metabolosomes and get a single mitochondrion, which’d allow you to grab 2 proteins regardless of their placement and turn them into a single mitochondrion which could be placed anywhere.
roughly, how the process works currently isn’t clear the way i see it when you place down a organelle it also places a cytoplasm there for the organelle to exist in (this may not be how it works on the back end but its how it looks.) so my rework suggestion is that it would do this on the back end as well, the space would have both organelle and Cytoplasm (Cytoplasm wont function if there is an organelle there just that it exists as a state of volume).
certainly, that would be a better system, although there Should still be a MP cost imo. my only issue with this is the relative time constraints on development. I’ve said this before but the devs really need to finish their work on the monocellular stage and move on, granted this feature would be valuable in multicellular stage also as multicellular stage can be entered pretty early after becoming a Eukaryote, and thus updating proteins to organelles may still be ongoing by the time the player makes that jump.
2 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
19
Usually you’d expect the player to already have moved mostly to eukaryotic organelles… But everyone has their own pace I guess.
In any case, I don’t rush multicellular when I’m playing, even when I unlock the option. That’s partially because there’s not really anything to do in multicellular. Right now, its mechanics amount to a proof of concept and a vague impression of what play might look like, and that proof of concept is itself rather empty.
I mean, have you tried making a multicell with any sort of weird shape? Even having too many flagella makes it look super weird. Cells don’t mesh together at all, run length is long, I think there’s still big issues with rotation, and, most importantly, there’s not really any point. Thrive just kinda peters out, which makes sense, because it’s still deep in dev.