As of right now. I feel as if consuming other cells rather than operating off of auto/chemotrophy is too energy extensive to be a viable strategy. “Plant” cells should reproduce fast enough so that “herbivore” cells that eat the autotrophic cells can sustain off of them. Rather than just go extinct.
But what do you guys think?
For me pulling cilia does the job most of the time. Put some injectosomes after becoming multicellular and few things can escape you alive…
I assume you scrape by with a low population though, correct?
I think in general that hunted species go extinct faster than they should. I do think that possibility should be there, it just appears to be too easy/frequent right now. Though that may in part be how many need to be eaten to stay alive, because meals certainly don’t last long.
I haven’t played 0.8.3 yet, but i remember getting to the hundreds as someone combining heterotrophy and autotrophy, although my food sources died out due to overhunting… But it could’ve changed in the new update
Yeah, but it works well I guess for the player experience.
Engulfed organisms do go extinct very quickly, which is also why Endosymbiosis so difficult to complete.
I think that mainly comes from auto-evo rapidly killing off whatever is not the top dog in at least one miche. And that one changes quite often.
Just one reason we really need more diverse miches. Though that may only partially solve the hunted to extinction problem.
Also we need size miches to allow prokaryotes and eukaryotes to coexist, which’d create a (hopefully) sustainable populace of critters to hunt and perhaps to be hunted by too…
Really, I don’t think the system is working correctly if species are going extinct due to predation. As their numbers drop, the numbers of predators drop as well. It’s a self-balancing system, unless:
I recently got the Thrive development environment set up. I will experiment and see if I can set up a “low reproduction cost” miche under some of the trees. That would hopefully lead to prokaryotes sticking around well in an organic way.
Isn’t the larger problem that eukaryotes fail to survive outside some specific miches like radiosynthesis?
Everyone is again forgetting that there is no penalty to being predated on in auto-evo specifically. The only population penalty happens due to the Darwinian evo system where cells that are simulated during gameplay get population buffs and penalties applied to their species if they die or manage to reproduce.
Maybe the penalty should be reduced or capped from reaching some very high values then?
That IS the penalty to being predated on, specifically. Perhaps death due to starvation or environmental damage and death due to being predated on could be penalized separately? Would increasing the penalty for starving or death by environment and decreasing the penalty for being eaten be possible?
Ah, so the answer to my “if” is “no” then. Seem alike that is not what’s causing these drops. And as far as I know, the Darwinian in-gameplay effects are also not so overwhelmingly large.
Maybe this is just observation bias? People mainly notice their prey and endosymbionts going extinct, because they’re not paying attention to the others.
Oh, is it? I thought they stuck around often enough and were eliminating prokaryotes. Could just be me.
But in any case, the existence of prokaryote-favouring miches would allow the other miches to favour eukaryotes more, both through organelle rebalancing and auto-evo itself.
It was the case a few versions back that eukaryotes would more or less permanently push out prokaryotes from the patches they reached but this seems to no longer be the case for some reason.
Technically yes, however it would get quite complex to differentiate between all the different damage sources and what counts as a being predated on because if I remember correctly the damage code receives basically the same information if you run into an environmental toxin or get hit with a projectile toxin. So there would need to be a lot of extra tracking of stuff to make sure deaths get attributed correctly either to the environment or being predated on.
They are not usually, but I’ve seen players who when asked have given screenshots of very extreme external effects (these are the Darwinian evo values). So it can happen that the penalties are so big per generation that a species is forced extinct.
It 100% can be because I doubt most people even ever look at the external effects section of the report.
Which is not really super good for debates when most of the players don’t know all of the game mechanics. Granted most developers also probably don’t know. It takes a very thorough investigation and maybe even diving into the Thrive code (which is possible as it is open source) to understand all aspects of the game.
To be completely fair I also often explain features to other devs who had no clue that such a system was implemented. For example someone might suggest some kind of tweak or feature, but then I have to tell them that I already implemented exactly that or a closely related thing months ago. So the players are not the only ones who aren’t fully always up to date on what features actually exist in Thrive.
Thim fixed that by fixing the problem in auto-evo where it was giving unfair and unintended bonuses to eukaryotes which meant they always outcompeted prokaryotes.
Then let’s have there be an upper cap to how much damage can those penealties cause, that way we might just be able to eliminate one-step extinction after the player enters a patch.
By the way, doesn’t this system technically allow the player to force other species out of their patch by simply killing the cells of those species for long enough?
I am not 100% sure, but I believe in previous versions of Thrive before the miche system, every organism death was a constant -60 to population, even for the AI species. Now, it seems like every cell death drastically reduces the population of AI species.