How much would it slow down the gameplay tho? I’m personally already not a fan of how you get the nucleus by just wasting an entire session, this way you’re going to have to go through way more generations. Remember that even though really high MP costs for everything is more realistic, the gameplay goes down by a lot. I’d personally prefer if the player would be able to unlock new organelles by either upgrading other organelles (for example, you might be able to turn a flagellum into a pilus for a certain amount of MP), or unlocking them through other means. (Endosymbiosis to unlock the mitochondrion / chloroplast for example)
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In my opinion the nucleus should be even harder to get, now it doesn’t feel like an achievement at all. And I have no problem with unlocking, but again, it should be harder to acquire. And I think that the gameplay being a bit slower is a good thing, as IMO it would not make the gameplay any more boring while also providing more playtime and making the decisions have a bit more impact.
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Do you mean that you can immediately place the nucleus? Or do you mean that even when you have to spend like 3 editor sessions buffing up your ATP production in order to support the nucleus? If it is the former, then it would be easy and make sense from game design perspective, to not let the player place the nucleus unless they have the required ATP production to support it.
Most people don’t seem to be the most interested in the cell stage. So I’ve been throwing around a play time of 1 to 2 hours in the cell stage for the first playthrough. I don’t think it should take much more than an hour for a first time player to get out of the cell stage. That means that the number of editor cycles the player has time to do is limited. If the average swimming around session is 3 to 5 minutes. Then the cell stage needs to be complete within 10 to 15 editor sessions. That doesn’t leave a ton of room for purposefully making progress slower.
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It’s radical, but may I suggest making it really cheap or even free to change the number of or rearrange organelles of a type you already have? That would free up MP for some of what’s being discussed here while keeping the number of editor visits small.
Organelle gluttony is easily the most pressing current gameplay issue. It makes what could be an interesting game with many styles of play unnecessarily 1-dimensional. Besides that, it’s not how things work in real life.
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I agree that rearranging organelles should be free or at least very cheap. After all, organelle placement is irrelevant, so if I decide to move all the mitochondria to one side of the cell, then why should that cost evolution points?
Gluttony is a known issue and is an unintended consequence of the current (and temporary) state of the game. It will be solved as the system is refined.
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Yeah I am pretty sure that gluttony is a result of energy being too freely available. We’re definitely going to cut that down (especially free floating glucose) and I think in patches where energy is scarce you just won’t be able to fuel a really big cell.
That’s definitely the next thing we should try for it I think.
I think this is not a perfect way to do it, but it’s the best idea we have so far. So the requirements for unlocking the nucleus would be ATP production, right? Once you reach “x” ATP/sec, the nucleus gets unlocked. One question I have, would it account 1) only for the production or would it account 2) for the production minus the current osmoregulation cost or 3) for the production minus the cost of osmoregulation if the nucleus was placed? Basically what would be the criteria?
I think that until we come up with a better solution this approach is the best we’ve got.
Also a minor side-note; not sure how hard would it be to implement, but I think that the organelles that are locked should not be visible in the editor. It will make the editor more organized and I think that the organelles and stuff gradually appearing in your editor’s left bar will be at least a minor improvement from them just not being grayed out anymore for the sense of progress. But again, low priority and I’m not sure how hard it would be to implement. On the other hand, as there will be more and more organelles added to the game, this might start to have higher priority for the sake of the editor being easier to navigate.
I think that’s a perfect length for neither speedrunning it, nor taking your time. So the average cell stage playthrough being circa one and a half hour long sounds just right, in my opinion. I’m not sure how much room will be left there for making the game slower, but I think that making the choice of organelles be a bit more impactful is a good investment. Plus, as I said, the price would go down once you’ve bought the organelle, so if an average cell has 5 different organelle types (not sure, someone please correct me if that’s not realistic), that would be 5 editor sessions for acquiring each type once. With the average length of a gameplay being 1h30m and the average time between editor sessions being 4 minutes, we’ve got around 20 editor sessions (again, that’s for the averages of the numbers we agree on). Minus the 5 for acquiring the organelles, that’s still 15 editor sessions left for upgrades, buying copies of the organelles you already have and so on. Keep in mind that the price would be lower now, so you would be able to get for example 2 organelles you already have and a minor upgrade every editor session. Or for example one organelle and a major upgrade of some organelle. I think this would be a pretty good system.
As for rearranging, I think that should be really cheap. Not for free, but really cheap. As for getting more of the organelles you already have, I think that the price should be around what it is now. I don’t think that getting 50 mitochondria for free wouldn’t be gameplay-breaking. My opinion is, as I stated before, that the first purchase should be very expensive (my idea is the whole 100MP you get), but all following purchases of that organelle having circa the same cost as they do now.
I think that the patch map being fully implemented with different condition in each patch will be a game changer and we have to wait and see how much will it affect the gameplay. IMO, it will greatly improve the specialization of each cell, but we’ll have to wait and see what problems will be solved by it and what problems will arise.
This is starting to be a really interesting discussion, I love it.
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I never thought about how long the microbe stage should be. I suppose 1-2 hours is fine. If the player has 10-15ish editor sessions, then the sessions will have to be quite meaningful. The very gradual nature of evolution would require many, many more editor sessions to smoothly convey, and that would probably just be tedious. Those 10-15 sessions would represent almost all of the Archean and Proterozoic eons, which is approximately three billion years. If there were 15 sessions, that would make each session 200 million years (of course, the in-game world would not have exactly the same age and progression as Earth did; I am using these numbers for comparison). If the algorithm calculates based on months, it will have to calculate 2.4 billion months (assuming 12-month years). Can we reasonably expect the computer the handle that?
I like the idea of having all the potential organelles be visible, but with some unselectable due to unfulfilled requirements. For example, if the environment has a lux value of zero, then chloroplasts are unselectable. Because the editor sessions represent such huge amounts of time, I think evolving the entire nucleus at once is acceptable. An efficient stats screen could inform the player about whether his cell produces enough ATP to support the nucleus.
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That makes experimentation less likely. I think we should keep the locked organelles grayed out, with the addition that their unlock condition is shown in the tool tip. That way the player sees all the different organelles and encourages them to experiment.
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Alright, so my suggestion is getting shot down and I feel like I need to justify myself. I did the same calculation as Solitarian, and figured that lots can happen in 200 million years, so it’s justified from a scientific perspective. From a gameplay perspective, there should be a sweet spot between too many of an organelle such that they are dead weight, and too few such that you don’t get the full benefit of them. 50 mitochondria shouldn’t be helpful in most environments, because there just isn’t that much sugar around to metabolize.
The way I envision it, long term strategy in the cell stage would be about finding a set of upgrade paths to proceed along that have synergy, and that’s the main thing you’d be thinking about at each editor visit.
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That’s a good point. Perhaps each mitochondrion could be able to handle a certain number of glucose units (let’s say 5 for the sake of example). So if you consistently have 25 glucose in your vacuoles, then 5 mitochondria would be perfect. A sixth mitochondrion would do nothing and just be wasted energy unless the player could have 26 glucose. With this system, the player would only need as many of an organelle as he could feed, and he would not want extra organelles due to them making the cell slower and costing energy to grow and maintain. The player would seek to have as much energy as possible with as few organelles as possible, thereby encouraging finding synergies and the most efficient strategies.
If I remember correctly, the editor sessions will not represent equal amounts of time; the earlier ones will represent more than the later ones, as evolution was faster toward the end of the Proterozoic eon than at its beginning.
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This is exactly how the game currently works? Is there a suggestion here?
Each organelle that does a process cannot do more than 100% efficiency. The mitochondria is pretty fast so it is maybe hard to see. But some other organelles can easily warrant duplicates to generate enough ATP.
That’s how it works now? That was not clear to me. Perhaps I am just oblivious. I thought that every extra mitochondrion increased efficiency. A detailed stats screen would help correct such confusion, I think.
If you want to know the gameplay, you can download version 0.3.3 or 0.3.4 to play the tutorial and familiarize yourself with the game. I recommend playing 0.3.3 over 0.3.4 because you cannot have photosynthesis in 0.3.4.
By the way, you can remap keys, I think. You just have to edit some files if I recall correctly.
Renaming this thread from “The future of Microbial stage” to " Ideas for the Microbe Stage [Put your ideas in this thread]", so that it’s unified with the two of @blackjacksike’s threads, as I think that gets the point across more effectively.
Also, I really like the fact that adding insane amount of mitochondria is useless, unless there’s enough glucose around you. However, I was not aware of this fact until now and by the look of things, I was not the only one. Maybe we should find a way to communicate this to the player. Perhaps a visual difference between the active and inactive state of the mitochondrion? Or maybe something in the editor, as to prevent players from accidentally investing into something they won’t need? This is a great system, but I think it’s not communicated well to the player.
This is something I have thought about for some time. This game needs a detailed stats screen. How much ATP does my cell produce and what processes are producing it? What is the rate at which I metabolize glucose? How much nitrogen does my cell produce/consume? All of this and more is currently obscure. When playing the game, I know I need to gather resources, but I don’t know which or how much or when or why.
For example, I have no way of knowing what the total ATP maintenance cost of my cell is, i.e. how much ATP per second all the organelles collectively require to remain alive. As such, I don’t know how much ATP I need to produce, and even if I did know that, I don’t know what the total ATP production capability of my cell is. I like that the editor tooltips give the numbers for individual organelles, but the resource production/consumption of the entire cell must also be indicated.
Yeah this is an issue we’re aware of. Personally I really like one of Nick’s ideas which is a bar in the editor which shows you how much ATP you produce, how much you use when stationary and how much when moving.
I think that would really help people see what is happening.
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That is actually shown in the editor. However if you are moving or you have flagella or some other organelle that consumes ATP then it isn’t completely accurate.
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Right, that’s what I mean. The osmoregulation cost is not representative of all organelles. Also, I thought that osmoregulation was connected to surface area and not organelles, i.e. 8 hexes of cytoplasm would have the same cost as 8 hexes of mitochondria. Is this not the case?
Yes I think the osmoregulation cost is 1 ATP/S per hex. So larger organelles cost more. I don’t believe currently the surface area is factored in. Though I may well be wrong.
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