I was thinking about the primal zerg from Star Craft 2 and thought it would be cool if we could make a creature with no creatures like it (select this when moving to awakening or multicellular), you would get mutation points from killing and eating other creatures, when you kill enough of one type of creature you can replicate parts of that creature that you don’t have yet (using Earth creatures for examples, kill a bunch of dear and get the ability to evolve horns, hooves, or their type of eyes. Kill a polar bear and get the ability to survive in frozen climates, get sharp claws or some other features), or instead of stealing a trait you could decide to increase your size on next cycle. After surviving a certain period of time you can make a den or something and go into a cocoon state for a set number of years (keep realistic evolution time) and enter the editor to make your new creature and hatch to start the process over (kill, eat, steal, evolve). To not get stuck at awakening stage these types of creatures could evolve the ability to make mini clones of itself (exactly the same) or evolve a completely new minion creature that you design that act as workers and you as an immortal hierarch (independent creatures don’t die of age, grow by adding the mass of creatures you eat to yourself (what isn’t digested that is)). In order to keep war and stuff like that in the game for independent creatures you could have the starter planet be a continental planet where different species become dominant on other continents. Each species would have nations on each continent to contend with and then you have to contend with the other sentient creature from other continents. The only reason humans were on the america’s is because of the ice bridge but on this planet maybe an ice age never happened, or it did and nothing transferred. Similar species may be able to co-exist (mammal and mammal) but different kinds (mammal and reptile or amphibian and insectoid) can’t or have a very low chance to co-exist and would go to war for dominance where they could then move to space stage.
I just realized I threw 2 different ideas out there, independent creatures, and different dominant creatures for different continents.
I’m thinking that gaining mutations by eating other creatures is propably not going to be added to the game, but the idea is certainly interesting and would offer quite different gameplay experience. Maybe at some point it could be like a challenge mode or something.
Different species on different continents is something I would definitely want to have in the game because without it I think the simulation would be too simple (by having the same species everywhere on one planet).
The point of a creature like this is to have a hyper aggressive hunter creature because the only way for independent creatures to progress is to eat other creatures. Independents should only be able to evolve basic combat parts and have to eat to get anything new from there. Due to how this plays now I feel it would make sense for it to get MP based on how much it kills, 1 MP for everything it kills maybe, maybe more MP the bigger the stuff it kills? While every other creature just has to survive to get 50 MP independents would need to kill about 50 creatures just to have the same points to spend. This would also mean it would need some natural advantages (high health and damage maybe) just to survive since it doesn’t have any other creatures to make a pack with and aid in hunting (btw is pack going to be a feature? I am guessing it is since a decent number of successful predators on Earth are pack hunters).