Few QoL observations and other things

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Things are supposed to get more polished in early multicellular prior to development switching to it as some features from microbe stage carry on to EM.

[Poodelicus (Crazy, Curious, and Stubborn)]

I think the BIGGEST problem with stage 2 is: Nothing else evolves to multicellular. Sure, your species splits off a bit, but a couple slightly altered versions of your past self that did not continue to grow bigger with you are not great competition. The awkward turning and things getting stuck inside of you are weird as well, but something other than your species evolving to multicellular would go a long way.

Also, with experimental features turned on and LAWK turned off, your cell stops being able to use Siderophore as soon as you grow a second cell, but your AI multicellular past selves do not lose this ability.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

I mean, those features are called “experimental” for a good reason…

[GOLANX]

multicellular is barely in a prototype phase right now which is why it isn’t very good, Most Games you wouldn’t see this level of Sausage, you’d be lucky if you could find it with cheats. so you don’t rush to multicellular as its more just the end of the current game, in the long run however, once multicellular stage gets its polish, rushing multicellular should be a fun strategy, let the players play at their own pace. It always important to keep an eye on the future, on what a game like Thrive can be, not just what it is now.

i decided to go full plant and make a Leaf, slow yet successful, even hit the Macroscopic level and awakened . little crap microbes did keep getting trapped though and with a Pilus they often reset my progress.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Couldn’t you move to a patch where the pili microbes weren’t present?

[hhyyrylainen]

Replying now as I’m back from my break.

@GOLANX

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

It was a pretty fundamental gameplay design choice to allow placing organelles without placing cytoplasm first. I can’t even remember when this was made but any change to this would be a very major game design discussion.

So you aren’t required to place cytoplasm first. I think if you switch your gameplay style to be more in line with what is expected (and I think like 99% of players do) that you basically never place cytoplasm, and if you do you don’t plan on placing organelles on top of it.

@GOLANX

Removing the Protein means removing the cytoplasm even if that means putting a hole in the cell

Related to the previous point this would be a very complex system to track if something was placed on top of cytoplasm so that the cytoplasm would be put back in when deleted. Otherwise this would be a major exploit to get free cytoplasm.

---

The remaining points are effects of auto-evo, which is not an area I can really say much about.

@GOLANX

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.

You can also use signaling agent in a bit unintended way to tell your species to go away (which is detrimental to their survival).

@GOLANX

Pilus is the only defense Auto-evo ever adds

@GOLANX

i’ll have to fight it later rather than just easily engulfing on prey.

@GOLANX

needed to advance the evolutionary arms race.

These kind of all are the same point: there isn’t that much iterative rock-paper-scissor mechanic in the game. So unfortunately pilus and toxins are like the endpoints so adding full counters to them would then make the game very unbalanced. And we’d need more counters again. So to really fix this we’d need to have like a circular chain of what is effective against what. Otherwise there isn’t really anything that can be done.

@Deus

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.

The player species spawn rate should basically be the exactly the same as AI species spawn based on the population. So it represents overcrowding pretty well I think. And sometimes leads to funny comments like players saying they want to “kill their own species.”

@aah31415

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…

Cells stuck all over the terrain would be very noticeable, which is why I’m against adding terrain if the AI isn’t updated at the same time.

@Poodelicus

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.

This isn’t directly directed at you but in general I think it is pretty funny (or unfortunate) how first players complain that it is pointless to add any eukaryotic organelles, and then we buff those variants, and now there’s the opposite complaint that the eukaryotic parts make the prokaryotic ones too bad in comparison so people want to more efficient features to help them ditch the prokaryoticparts.

@thriveuser1454

No, the idea is that when you delete an organelle it places cytoplasm where it was.

If you place an organelle and then delete it, you have gained a free cytoplasm.

@GOLANX

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.

This is 100% just a convenience feature to make it less annoying.

Or, and here I admit I don’t actually know as I haven’t been with the project long enough, maybe it used to be so that you always had to place cytoplasm first which would explain some of the old code behaviour, and that was then found just bad design and the requirement to place things on cytoplasm was removed, but the feature to allow things still to be placed on cytoplasm was kept to keep older players happy.

@GOLANX

less storage granted by Organelles that aren’t vacuoles or cytoplasm

Are you sure? 0.8.0 nerfed all storage by 50% already…

@GOLANX

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).

In the backend each organelle (and cytoplasm is an organelle) consist of a list of hexes it occupies. No two organelles can have overlapping hexes. Internally the cytoplasm that you place something on is just totally deleted (and only a reference in the undo history is kept temporary to allow undoing the replacement action).

@GOLANX

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.

Thanks for understanding a point I wish everyone suggesting any changes to the microbe stage would know.

@Poodelicus

Also, with experimental features turned on and LAWK turned off, your cell stops being able to use Siderophore as soon as you grow a second cell, but your AI multicellular past selves do not lose this ability.

Good thing it is an experimental feature, otherwise I’d need to open a new bug…

(this is probably just a case of forgetting to hook up the colony related GUI logic to work with the siderophore)

[Poodelicus (Crazy, Curious, and Stubborn)]

@Poodelicus

the fact that “upgrading” two adjacent Metabolosomes into a Mitochondria is less efficient than creating a new Mitochondria from scratch

@hhyyrylainen

and now there’s the opposite complaint that the eukaryotic parts make the prokaryotic ones too bad in comparison

I meant the cost. It costs more mutation points to “upgrade” than to create something from scratch. I would think improving whats already there would, IRL, be “cheaper”/take fewer generations than building something new.

In game now, you pay a deletion cost and a separate adding cost in mutation points. But a part becoming more efficient, or two parts merging, would not be quite the same as unevolving one and evolving the other. Right now, instead of your lungs “growing” you unevolve your lungs and evolve new bigger lungs from scratch. Mutation point wise.

[hhyyrylainen]

I see what you mean now. I’m not sure on the realism aspect though as a new organelle doesn’t imply that old DNA can much more quickly mutate to match that. Or does it, I’m really not sure? I think a more viable option would be to rework things so that the first copy of each organelle is really expensive but it gets cheaper for subsequent ones (to model how I think DNA works that you can easily duplicate something but it is much harder to evolve a brand new thing).

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Yeah. Wouldn’t that be a sort of an upgrade to organelle unlocks? With the first organelle of it’s kind being a “discovery” and the subsequent ones being it’s cheaper (as they’re following what was already present at that point) followups?

[thriveuser1454 (Occasional Thrive Player)]

@hhyyrylainen

Related to the previous point this would be a very complex system to track if something was placed on top of cytoplasm so that the cytoplasm would be put back in when deleted. Otherwise this would be a major exploit to get free cytoplasm.

@hhyyrylainen

@thriveuser1454

No, the idea is that when you delete an organelle it places cytoplasm where it was.

If you place an organelle and then delete it, you have gained a free cytoplasm.

You could set it up like this:

• Adding a cytoplasm-based part costs X+Y MP. X is the price of raw cytoplasm and Y the additional cost of putting a part on the cytoplasm. Removing the part similarly costs 2A MP and can be done in two steps; the first step removes the part, and the second the cytoplasm.
• You could make ‘free’ cytoplasm by adding a part and then deleting the part while leaving the cytoplasm intact, but this would be more expensive than adding in cytoplasm normally (cytoplasm would cost X placed normally and X+Y+A placed abnormally) so it could simply be abstracted out of the game entirely, like how the system normally calculates your MP based on the optimal route to achieve the changes you’ve made.

I don’t think it counts as ‘free cytoplasm’. In fact, it’s a more expensive way to make cytoplasm than the normal method.

@hhyyrylainen

I see what you mean now. I’m not sure on the realism aspect though as a new organelle doesn’t imply that old DNA can much more quickly mutate to match that. Or does it, I’m really not sure? I think a more viable option would be to rework things so that the first copy of each organelle is really expensive but it gets cheaper for subsequent ones (to model how I think DNA works that you can easily duplicate something but it is much harder to evolve a brand new thing).

@aah31415

Yeah. Wouldn’t that be a sort of an upgrade to organelle unlocks? With the first organelle of it’s kind being a “discovery” and the subsequent ones being it’s cheaper (as they’re following what was already present at that point) followups?

I think adding this would be very nice, especially if a similar facet was added to auto-evo (where it favors duplicating parts already in the species). It would encourage specialisation on all fronts.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Assuming the autoevo species didn’t evolve like 3 various organelles…
Also I’d imagine it would be a nightmare to change the way autoevo works in any way at this point.

[hhyyrylainen]

@thriveuser1454

• Adding a cytoplasm-based part costs X+Y MP. X is the price of raw cytoplasm and Y the additional cost of putting a part on the cytoplasm. Removing the part similarly costs 2A MP and can be done in two steps; the first step removes the part, and the second the cytoplasm.
• You could make ‘free’ cytoplasm by adding a part and then deleting the part while leaving the cytoplasm intact, but this would be more expensive than adding in cytoplasm normally (cytoplasm would cost X placed normally and X+Y+A placed abnormally) so it could simply be abstracted out of the game entirely, like how the system normally calculates your MP based on the optimal route to achieve the changes you’ve made.

This is a reasonable enough suggestion for the player side editor things. But it’s going to be very tricky to program as the MP calculation based on action combining objects, is very complicated. And also the auto-evo mutations algorithms likely will need to be also updated to compensate, because otherwise the player would be given an extra advantage. So there’s at least 2 very hard programming tasks related to making this kind of change.

Edit: really briefly I want to counter your second point: thanks to that very complicated action combining system, no matter which way you create the cytoplasm it should cost the same. As if you place an organelle and then delete it, those two actions are automatically detected as canceling out and not taken into account when calculating remaining MP.

Hopefully that illustrates why the action combining system is very difficult to work with.

[GOLANX]

@hhyyrylainen

So you aren’t required to place cytoplasm first. I think if you switch your gameplay style to be more in line with what is expected (and I think like 99% of players do) that you basically never place cytoplasm, and if you do you don’t plan on placing organelles on top of it.

that feels kinda cheaty to me, maybe not to everyone, but i saw that and made those connections, after my first playthrough, and my first thought was oop, i hit a bug, sausage of an unfinished game. that said if it would be a big pain, i agree 100% this feedback isn’t a reason for any significant delays.

@hhyyrylainen

Related to the previous point this would be a very complex system to track if something was placed on top of cytoplasm so that the cytoplasm would be put back in when deleted. Otherwise this would be a major exploit to get free cytoplasm.

that’s the funny bit, they would all leave behind cytoplasm as the organelle creates cytoplasm when you add it.

@hhyyrylainen

These kind of all are the same point: there isn’t that much iterative rock-paper-scissor mechanic in the game. So unfortunately pilus and toxins are like the endpoints so adding full counters to them would then make the game very unbalanced. And we’d need more counters again. So to really fix this we’d need to have like a circular chain of what is effective against what. Otherwise there isn’t really anything that can be done.

most of that part is still autoevo, it’s not creating diverse defenses which leaves me with the samey gameplay of you occasionally have to be cautious about the ones with a Pilus, and never add defenses to your own species it will bite you later.

@hhyyrylainen

This isn’t directly directed at you but in general I think it is pretty funny (or unfortunate) how first players complain that it is pointless to add any eukaryotic organelles, and then we buff those variants, and now there’s the opposite complaint that the eukaryotic parts make the prokaryotic ones too bad in comparison so people want to more efficient features to help them ditch the prokaryoticparts.

i’m not sure why you find players wanting to ditch prokaryotic parts a negative? upgrading the cell is just part of the process of evolution, Microbe Stage isn’t the end goal only the beginning to multicellular, macroscopic, on up. best i would suggest to make prokaryotic competitive would be to make them cheaper once the nucleus is added, but i really urge you to consider the idea that the eukaryotic parts are an upgrade of the Prokaryotic proteins. ergo why i started out suggesting that it would be an upgrade.

@hhyyrylainen

If you place an organelle and then delete it, you have gained a free cytoplasm.

if you did this in the same turn it shouldn’t gift you a cytoplasam,

@hhyyrylainen

This is 100% just a convenience feature to make it less annoying.

Or, and here I admit I don’t actually know as I haven’t been with the project long enough, maybe it used to be so that you always had to place cytoplasm first which would explain some of the old code behaviour, and that was then found just bad design and the requirement to place things on cytoplasm was removed, but the feature to allow things still to be placed on cytoplasm was kept to keep older players happy.

you sound like you might consider this convenience a bad thing?
also im the wrong person to ask about the way this game used to be i picked it up not even a month ago, right before 0.8.0 hit

@hhyyrylainen

Are you sure? 0.8.0 nerfed all storage by 50% already…

hmm i think a slider might be good here, i do recall having a harder time engulfing prey since the update, didn’t realize that was nerfed specifically.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

The storage nerf was made to give more reasonage for players to add cytoplasm and vacuoles to their builds.
What would the slider moderate?

[hhyyrylainen]

@GOLANX

that feels kinda cheaty to me, maybe not to everyone, but i saw that and made those connections, after my first playthrough, and my first thought was oop, i hit a bug, sausage of an unfinished game. that said if it would be a big pain, i agree 100% this feedback isn’t a reason for any significant delays.

You would be then happy to see this put into the game:

Re-assessing Microbe Stage Progression: The Proteome Method

I replied with the info on the desire to make cytoplasm required for placing organelles on top: Re-assessing Microbe Stage Progression: The Proteome Method - #4 by hhyyrylainen - Gameplay - Thrive Development Forum

This idea isn’t on the microbe roadmap so there’s no guarantee on it being developed.

@GOLANX

that’s the funny bit, they would all leave behind cytoplasm as the organelle creates cytoplasm when you add it.

@GOLANX

if you did this in the same turn it shouldn’t gift you a cytoplasam,

I realized this with that reply I made on the dev forum today.

@GOLANX

you sound like you might consider this convenience a bad thing?
also im the wrong person to ask about the way this game used to be i picked it up not even a month ago, right before 0.8.0 hit

I just wanted to try to explain why the feature might be coded the way it is currently.

@GOLANX

most of that part is still autoevo, it’s not creating diverse defenses which leaves me with the samey gameplay of you occasionally have to be cautious about the ones with a Pilus, and never add defenses to your own species it will bite you later.

Which defences it could create with our current game mechanics, that wouldn’t be a dead end with a counter?

@GOLANX

i’m not sure why you find players wanting to ditch prokaryotic parts a negative? upgrading the cell is just part of the process of evolution

Mainly because people complain about it, and I’m almost the only one on the team replying to player feedback so it gets tiring for me…

@GOLANX

hmm i think a slider might be good here, i do recall having a harder time engulfing prey since the update, didn’t realize that was nerfed specifically.

Actually engulf storage is not related to compound storage so I’m pretty sure that shouldn’t have changed in 0.8.0…

@aah31415

The storage nerf was made to give more reasonage for players to add cytoplasm and vacuoles to their builds.
What would the slider moderate?

It could in theory be a difficulty option like osmoregulation so you have less reason to worry about storage. For example someone might enjoy the problem of managing storage and placing specialized vacuoles. Whereas someone else just wants to crank up the storage slider and never place a single vacuole in their life.

The reason it isn’t a slider is that:

• No one has suggested it before
• It would be relatively tricky to always make sure that auto-evo does sensible things with storage (so potential for rare bug cases as most of us developers would probably ever just play with default storage setting)

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

I can also guess such a slider would just make the game easier if you don’t have to worry about your storage capacity being low.

[hhyyrylainen]

I mean if the slider has the middle point be the current storage balance, you could turn it lower or higher depending on if you want the storage part of the game to be easier or harder. Like if each cytoplasm just gives 0.2 storage, that would make the game already a lot harder (especially the very early game).

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Perhaps it could be an “advanced difficulty option” then…

[GOLANX]

You can tell Buckly he earned himself a heart even if i can’t give it to him, and a hug if i ever meet him, i liked just about everything i read. i really like the proto-nucleus idea and the fact that getting a nucleus is dependant on size and not just a buttload of ATP. Proto-Nucleus would give the player time to adjust as the ATP costs go up gradually, but it does look like a big ask so i understand if that’s not reasonable atm, you could maybe add those models to the trenchcoat one at a time though… srry i just loved the trenchcoat analogy.

And thank you for sharing my thoughts with the team, and sharing this news I loved it.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

How long would the microbe stage get with this proteosome approach? I can guess it would make it significantly longer at least…