I noticed that I might’ve become somewhat yuyified…
Going back to the topic, when multicellular autoevo gets added once we move to multicellular development, it should be able to interact with single-celled autoevo. Would this add more miches for the single-celled autoevo to occupy or would the microbe miches stay the same?
My experience in the game in Thrive says the opposite - auto-evo species do not want to specialize, instead they use several types of nutrition at once (I have seen many chemolithotrophic photosynthesizers, just trust me.).
I would also highlight a few more problems associated with this topic: 1. Make the obligate heterotroph more profitable in terms of glucose production. 2. Make it more profitable to specialize in pure autotrophy, both for the player and for the auto-evo (I have a save where almost all surface biomes had only my heterotrophic-phototrophic species.) 3. Make it much more profitable for autoevo to specialize on only one food source (I’ve seen a lot of chemlithotrophic-photosynthetic mixotrophs in the game even with the current mish system). 4. Slow replenishment of autotrophic organisms of prey.
The thing is that we’d need to balance this so that mixothrophs can still evolve but just not in the quantity they have been over the various autoevo iterations. And I don’t think the devforce has enough time to make a new, polished auto-evo iteration in the present situation.
Alas, auto-evo is being devved by a single guy and it’s not doing so well.
This, specifically, is probably a side-effect of auto-evo’s tendency to basically exterminate every species that isn’t you if you stay in the same patch for too long. It’s possible that your save is the result of auto-evo determining that your species is much better than all of the competition. This is great, for you, but still a bad sign, since it means that auto-evo isn’t generating good enough species to compete.
Apparently in 0.8.1 Autoevo’s “strenght” on the player will be increased per default, so perhaps that will help in reducing the amount of cases where the player species finds no other capable of standing up to itself…
I still think an increased number of more specific miches would solve the problem, but I also think that progressing towards bigger features and later stages to bring more money and manpower in is more important now. Later, when it’s more feasible, having distinct specialist and omnitroph miches would lead to more specialists and greatly increase the diversity of organisms in your patch, but I don’t think it’s worth delaying the “completion” of microbe and moving to multicellular to do that just yet. Though “niches” will definitely need to be more numerous and specific.
What’s actually important now is that how the miche tree looks like (in terms of what species occupy which miches).
These sound like gameplay related points? Which is absolutely not what auto-evo uses so game balance and auto-evo simulation balance of things are only very loosely related.
You should check out our github repo, there’s been multiple people in the recent weeks doing work on auto-evo…
And hopefully more are to come in the future to this part of the game no less important than the gameplay itself.
So, I was reading pages on the developer wiki and found 2 things about niches I thought might be applied to miches. First, on the actual Niches page, they listed generalist and specialist separately. This more or less matches my earlier suggestion here to fix @thriveuser1454’s complaint. Additionally, Biomes suggests having SIZE based niches. This might help with both the rarity of a gargantuan cell big enough to engulf the player, and the fact that sometimes cells small enough to be engulfed all die off.
It still will very likely be a challenge to get such a species to emerge before the player species already attains size large enough to evade the engulfs.
I remember when I first started playing, there was usually 1 HUGE species I had to avoid, then they became super rare. I miss the challenge.
Also, they were large but simple, I think they were mostly cytoplasm. Though I remember 1 shooting mucus at me to prevent me from running away.
I wonder how balanced this would be for the AI being set to have the maximum mutation rate settings…
It could potentially lead to player having much less of a dominant position within the biota…
Oh, so you never got to see 200+ hex cell behemoths in your playthroughs…Yeah, I miss those, too.
That could be a good thing. The fact that nothing hunts the player anymore is a problem.
I’m sorry they got that large?
Yup. When mutation rate could be set to 5 in previous versions. I think the largest cell I saw was over 250 hexes in size, and the longer you go, the bigger they get…So, theoretically, an organism could be over 400 hexes in size if you played for 4.5 billion years. Sadly, I did not do that due to other things in life.
The one that kept shooting mucus at me was like ten times my size, but when I became multicellular, I got my revenge on it. Mwahaha.
Were these things even sustainable in the actual gameplay or did autoevo delude itself into thinking they were?
None of those giant cells were actually viable…But it was so cool to see two 150+ hex Eukaryotic cells fighting each other in one older playthrough. Literally, a “Let them fight” moment.