After playing and some testing I have edited my previous post.
And oh god, the new organelle is useless.
Lets talk about nucleus
Nucleus is the key thing to have as it provides the cell with massive amount of stats and it unlocks the best organelles in the game. Since most of prokaryotic organelles are just worsened versions of the eukaryotic ones, there is no point in not rushing the nucleus.
The question is - how fast could you build it?
I always go for gen3 nucleus after putting two metabolosomes to keep up with atp costs. While I’m having some problems getting to gen4, It seems to be the way to go because of the mito-chloro combo. That means that I dont even look at other prokaryotic organelles most of the time. That kind of makes them redundant.
Getting a nucleus does not feel like an accomplishment, it is more of the necessity.
Right now it feels like there is no early game. The game kind of starts after gen5, everything before it is simply a quick build-up.
I feel like oxygen level should be lower(8+1 per generation) in order for glycolysis to be impactful and for prolonging the early game. After that you get a nucleus and for the next 5 generations you are trying to keep up with the atp costs - that is kind of a midgame. After gen10 though players first priority should shift from atp balance to something else - but that is a problem for another day.
For now, I want to ban myself from using metabolosomes and rushing nucleus to investigate deeper into less viable builds.
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I really am loving this feedback and in depth analysis 
I guess we need to buff some organelles, i suppose patches will help with a tad so compounds will be different in different biomes and chloroplast will be useless in the abyss etc…
Do you have any suggestions for improving this? To make the nucleus feel more like an accomplishment?
Would love to hear some ideas on this front.
BTW nitrogenase also does glyclolysis and we buffed glyclolysis for the cytoplasm. (It has its own special version of it which is much better now (Though still not amazing ), and i dont think you saw it)
For the future I kinda like that the nucleus already feels important. As once we get started on early multicellular I think that locking the binding agent vacuole behind the nucleus is a good way to limit the player from trying to start towards multicellularity way too soon.
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I suppose that every F-tier organelle needs a buff (except for cytoplasm, I think it sits in a weird place of a jack-of -all-trades organelle so it is harder to balance it. It is probably a good idea to just leave cytoplasm as it is for now), D-tier organelles are probably good as they are:
Chromatophore could shine in low oxygen environments
Rusticyanin is good in environments with limited glucose
NFP and Toxin are good for the late game, when the ATP production is high enough.
For the mito-chloro combo, I think patches will stand for a indirect nerf.
I have already proposed changing oxygen level in the atmosphere - that’s an easy solution for about a half of the problem.
For the rest of the problem - competition for other resources is not a concern now, and if implemented, it should create another variable to an equation, which will improve the ability to balance the game. I dont really have an idea how to make this right now, maybe I’ll come up with something as my understanding of the meta grows.
I have seen the cytoplasm glycolysis buff, but I dont really feel like that makes any difference, since two mitochondria gives you 15 ATP/sec spending only 0.06 glucose per second, and three cytoplasm is 12 ATP/sec for 0.18 glucose.
I totally agree with you. In my last post I wanted to say that (hard-to-get)/(important-to-get) value of the nucleus is too low atm, so I can just rush it every game while missing all of the cool prokaryote stuff.
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Toxic prokariotes are australian toads.
Or cats, or sheep, or rabbits, whatever.
90% of what I have said before was lying on the surface, today we are going to start to dig a tad deeper.
I have tried running the game without putting metabolosomes. As a consequence, I havent been able to go for a gen3 nucleus, and I had to pay closer attention to other organelles. I have finally found a way to use cytoplasm, so it is suddenly B-tier. (As I said, jack-of-all-trades position is weird and I think that even without changes to it, cytoplasm could be anywhere between S and F tier in the next version).
What I have noticed in my runs is that nothing really changed, since I basically had no competition for the little resources I needed. Why does this happen?
I feel like there are two reasons for that, one is straightforward and the other is not:
1) Glucose requirements for ATP production are too low and I havent been struggling with glucose even once since I installed v0.4.1.
2) Toxic prokaryotes and organelle gluttony.
So, as I said, today’s topic is a little bit more complicated, so hang with me:
Lets divide all cells into weight classes:
- Light - <5 hexes - all of the prokaryotes I have seen. They are always numerous
- Light-mid - 5-15 hexes - there are none
- Mid - 15-25 hexes - I rarely see these
- Mid-heavy - 25-40 hexes - these are the most common eukaryotes
- Heavy - >40 hexes. - these are less common, but you still see them every once in a while.
From my observations, there is an almost total absence of cells with 5-25 hexes.
What does this mean?
Imagine that you start the game, you are the small prokaryote. Who is going to try to kill you? There is no big prokaryotes and you are too small and agile for big cells to bother chasing you and for toxic prokaryotes to hit you. That means that you dont really have any predators.
But why there are no cells with 5-15 hex size?
Again, it is kind of obvious why eukaryotes dont get smaller than 15 hexes - they need to have some organelles to counter the nucleus costs, especially due to an ATP bug.
But why are there no big prokaryotes?
Pros and cons of being a big prokaryote:
Pros:
- You are being able to eat smaller prokaryotes (you actually cant because of the toxic prokaryotes)
Cons:
- Putting any organelle makes you reproduce slower, and the difference between 5 and 6 hexes is quite noticeable.
- You become a more valuable prey, while also getting slower.
- You need more ATP (since every prokaryotic organelle produces ATP or glucose, that is not actually a concern)
Now let’s talk about toxic prokaryotes.
They appear in every game, they are reproducing fast, there are a lot of them, they shoot at you and you cant safely eat them. They are like a virus spreading in every game I play and they are often the only species of prokaryotes left by generation 13. They are so overpowered that they define a current meta. They make hunting as a big prokaryote basically impossible and they make lives of smaller eukaryotes really hard.
The weird thing is, that coupled with hp change of 0.4.0, they are able to stop the organelle gluttony - the bigger you get, the easier it is to hit you. That’s why I compared them to australian toads - they were brought to the Australia to solve a beetle problem, but they became a much bigger problem themselves.
Lets recap: the toxic prokaryotes are everywhere, you cant fight them, you cant outcompete them, you cant even make a toxic prokaryote yourself because you need a nucleus to unlock toxins.
I think they should be severely nerfed or removed from the game whatsoever.
That build cant actually be diretly nerfed because it will just make toxin vacuole useless forever.
I suggest changing the hp formula. Anyway, it needs to be done at some point and the sooner the better. Maybe a good idea is to make hp proportional to the square root of hex size(1 hex - 25 hp, 4 hexes - 50 hp, 16 hexes - 100 hp, somehting like that). I think that toxic prokaryote should have around 20 hp, so it would die in one shot. That way you can at least kill them from a safe distance with your own toxins relatively quickly.
The downside of that decision is that is a buff to organelle gluttony, but right now it is smaller of these two problems.
Edit: I get why everything has the same amount of hp - to kill a cell you just have to tear its membrane. In that case I dont really see how to nerf these creatures. Adding some ways to counter toxins might help, but it will just force everyone to have these, which is also not healthy for the balance. Glucose consumption increase might help.
Removing these creatures from the game however still looks like the thing worth considering, since they also break the consistency of the gameplay.
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This system of dynamic health had been in place for 0.3.4, yet it sadly has been lost during the engine migration.
It was specifically removed. So it was a design decision that the health of a microbe was decoupled from the organelles it has. Before that you always had to fully heal before you could continue towards reproduction.
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Is organelle gluttony a thing?
Right now I’m doing runs with these home rules:
- No chloroplasts
- Maximum of 2 mitochondria.
I’m going to describe what I have found a bit later, for now - I had a run with no toxic prokaryotes. What I have found interesting about this run:
- Other prokaryotes have no way of escaping danger (no pilus for self-defense, flagellas dont give enough movement speed), so all of them went nearly extinct by gen 10. Only prokaryotes that did somewhat okay were the simplest ones, because they are able to reproduce fast.
- Until gen 7 nobody had a flagellum and every species were just increasing in size. I was doing that as well, but I wasn’t able to really catch up because I was smaller to begin with.
- After gen 7 suddenly every species went for at least one flagellum, and the biggest guy got four. That made my game kind of harder, but it was more due to the fact that other cells just became more aggressive. Movement speed difference was not high enough to reliably catch me.
- I got tired of trying to compete with others in size, so I just got myself one toxin vacuole and became te king of the sea. Nobody could do anything about me, and, since they were so big, they gave me a lot of loot.
- After that I was spawned in another biome, which had its own meta. In other words, everything was just smaller and there were relatively many prokaryotes. Well, I just ate everything I saw and the bigger the cell was, the easier it was to kill it.
In other words, in the meta with no toxic shooters becoming the first one to acquire that skill means an easy victory and in such a meta toxic shooter would be a top tier pick.
That means it is probably the toxins that should be nerfed somehow, either directly or by introducing ways to resist them.
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What happens if you ban the most broken combo?
First of all, right now I generally stop rounds about 11-12 generations in simply because there is no point in continuing. By that time I am able to put everything I wanted on my cell and become the king of the sea.
I have been playing with my home rules:
- No chloroplasts
- Maximum of two mitochondria allowed.
As always, I have rushed the gen3 nucleus. Instead of going for mito-chloro combo I had to just put 2 mitochondria for gen4. For the rest of my game I’ve just used metabolosomes and cytoplasm for atp production. At first I have decided to put two chemoplasts for glucose production, but I rarely had to use them, because glucose is plentyful in these waters. I still got around 6 chemoplast simply because they have the second-to-best cost-per-hex ratio and I wanted to be able to engulf things.
After that I went for a toxin vacuole and some flagellas.
- Toxin vacuole is the best late game pick because there is no counters to it and everything is big. However it is generally not worth going for until generation 7, which is why I dont consider it a good organelle (probably I needed to make separate tier lists for early and late game)
-
Flagellas actually give you a good amount of speed, so there is no need for a buff. I feel like the speed of the cell in the editor is bugged and that AI cells cant use flagellas properly for some reason. I have never seen them reach even 80% of the speed I can with roughly the same cell size and flagella count
But it is also not worth going for until generation 8, and by that point you dont really need speed in the current meta for the reasons above.
I have edited the tier list again. I feel like that is one of the final edits though.
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RE Flagella, I have seen the issues with flagella aswell, i think its a combination of issues, first off it isnt obvious whats causing it because the game just looks at movement direction and applies extra force in directions where the flagella will help and its generalized so both the player and AI use the same code, so it will require detective work to see if it even does this for AI (though it looked like it was), second off the AI can only make use of flagella on the back of the cell, because they cannot strafe like the player can they always turn to face the direction they are going )(this would require some minor AI tweaks), third off, the mutation system doesnt always place flagella in useful locations, so that will be needed to be looked at aswell. SO its a pretty hard issue, and it will touch alot of code for a proper fix.
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As I have noticed, AI cells tend to enter engulf mode too early and they are severely slowed down simply because of that in a lot of cases.
I feel like it could be useful if the amount of toxin organelles would increase your firing speed with them, since I never needed more than a single one, and the base speed is really slow. This way they’d even be a useful investment early game, because you’d be able to get a high amount faster. Then again, the spicy bois with multiple toxin organelles would be even stronger, so I’m not entirely sure.
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Well, it is definitely possible to make toxic organelles good in the early game. The question is - should they be good early on? For my part, I dont think so.
I really like the idea of the “power spike”. It basically means that every item (organelle in our case) has its own timeframe (generations in our case) where it is the most useful. In Thrive, for example, I would like to see most prokaryotic organelles shine until you have the nucleus while mitochondria, chloroplast, e.t.c (other atp and glucose producing organelles) shine in the midgame. I think that toxins should not really be viable until the late game, since they are really strong.
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Multiple toxin vacuoles does lower the cooldown.
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…what. How did I miss that? Was that added in a later update and I just missed the patch notes or was I just an idiot?
But in the final product oxytoxys will be replaced by the more versatile agents anyway, so spending too much time balancing them might not be the best idea. (According to what I’ve seen on the dev forums, agents might even not take too long, but yeah IANA dev so idk)
(There really needs to be a way to show you’re not responding to a single post without double posting)
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Its been around for awhile. But yeah they will be replaced, doesn’t mean we cant balance them lol., But we shouldn’t spend TOO MUCH time on it. I would like to get new agents in eventually, sooner rather then later.
Well, agents will probably be based on current toxin vacuoles, so balancing toxins now will reduce the amount of work later
I have responded actually just to show you this. Here you go
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There is no butterfly effect
Ok, sooo. I have tried to do a prokaryotic build, went for some cytoplasm, metabolosome and a flagella. I wanted to see how life is going for cells in the light-mid weight class I have described earlier. Turns out, pretty damn good, if you are able to avoid a single predator who tries to eat you. Well, I had no toxic prokaryotes in my run, so it was probably not very fair to judge. Anyway, this is not really interesting.
By gen five, I got bored of playing the game and tried to play the metagame. I asked myself a single question - how does player’s actions affect the world around him.
To answer this, I decided to not evolve as fast as possible and stay in the current generation for a bit. For about ten minutes I was just going aroung killing every single prokaryote I could find.
After killing about a hundred prokaryotes I have noticed that nothing has really changed. Maybe the number of prokaryotes went down a bit, but I’m not sure. I have decided to enter the editor and see how everyone will evolve.
So, after exiting the editor I have been greeted by the same creatures, no newcomers, population of prokaryotes went up again. It seemed like my actions had no effect on my surroundings.
I have decided to go two generations forward and… still nothing. Well, to be fair, eukaryotes evolved, but prokaryotes stayed the same. Even their behaviour was the same. I was expecting they would develop some ways to counter me, but it seems like that is not the case.
Another question is if players actions should affect the surrounding world. I’d say no, but that’s not for me to decide.
The main point of all of this - it seems like evolution is going much slower for ither creatures than for the player. That might become a huge issue in 0.4.2 since everything would start as a single hex of cytoplasm. My main concern is that I have never seen a prokaryote to get a nucleus, but it might be due to the fact that it changes the look of the cell so much that I cant recognize it anymore.
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