When will intraspecific competition be implemented?
As far as I know, cannibalism between adult members of a species is generally rare, but they’ll often compete for resources without hunting each other. See: all the mating-related violence animals get up to. There’s no real reason why the player’s microbes can’t stab each other, it’s just a gameplay thing.
So, what sorts of intraspecific competition are reasonable, and when will they begin to be added? When do I get to stab myself for food?
The problem is that for now, if cannibalism has no penalties, then almost everyone will use it without penalty for their own species.
it’d be pretty easy to make it have the obvious penalty…
Pretty sure cannibalism hasn’t been added yet due to balancing issues (with the behaviour editor you could just turn your speciesmates into floating meat bags).
This is exactly it, all players would just kill their own species all the time as there would be no downside.
Apparently there isn’t an open issue for this, but there’s definitely a code comment on the line that prevents attacking your own species about allowing it in the future when a proper drawback is designed.
Well a lot of players give feedback about how their own species has eaten a chunk that they were going for. Also your species members can eat prey or clouds you are targeting.
Yeah, that, at least, is viable emergent intraspecific competition.
At some point, attacking other members of your species will need to be properly implemented, for mate selection at least. I can imagine some creatures which might fight each other over food.
The population penalty for killing a member of your own species should probably be the main part, but I don’t know how exactly you’d balance that, especially with how bad auto-evo is at dealing with the player species.
The problem is that we’d need to make the player species be able to actually die out without needing the player itself to die. If the player never dies, neither will the player species.
As far as cannibalism, there are more species than you might think that kill young of their own species (usually but not not always males killing spawn of another male), but, relatively speaking, most of those species have a higher birth rate than Filicide rate. Separate but somewhat related, Sea Turtles and Octopus have large quantities of young, most of which do not make it to adulthood, but despite the shear percentage of killed young members of those species, the births out way the deaths. The species thrive despite their child mortality rates because the birth rates are big enough to overcome those. Current Auto-Evo may have difficulty with this, but it’s really just a numbers game.
As for sexual selection/mating competition, I am curious to see where Thrive eventually goes with this. Those I suspect mating competition to require mid or later stage 3 levels of intelligence.
Also:
If the player sexually reproduces and cannot find a mate, there will be no next generation. Assuming of course there are not other members of its species on another continent. Local extinction vs global extinction might be interesting.
Edit: Unless it is capable of Parthenogenesis. Though it would not evolve doing that.
That’s just r-type species at work.
I wonder how will thr K/r distinction work like ingame…