My thoughts on Deus' idea of population

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I’m currently reading through Deus’ post in the dev forum in regards to how Microbe should play and what the problems are with each of its sub-phases, and I’ve come across the following:

Building Up Your Population - You start building up your population, giving you more or less margin for error in the later stage. In any game, it’s just a good feeling to know that you are being rewarded for your efforts, and to know what exactly seems to be working best.
No Visual Feedback on Success - Players just might not be sure on how well they are doing. It’s hard to track population numbers and extrapolate that to success; something more visual might be needed.

Prior to reading this, I wasn’t aware that building up your population was a… thing you were supposed to be doing. In the current design of Microbe, population is something to be ignored; all major improvements to your cell (that is, adding new parts) will result in your population dropping, since you’ve gotten larger. In fact, most improvements I try also reduce my energy gathered, if I remember correctly. This is partially the fault of auto-evo not being in the best state; when I’ve tried following its suggestions, they boil down to ‘metabolise everything and make a bunch of toxins’. The miche tree is unreliable and exceptionally thin at the best of times.

I think there definitely needs to be some sort of better element to indicate how well your species is doing than raw population. Size needs to be controlled for somehow; ideally, I’d also like to be able to view population in the lens of ‘how many times can I die on a bad run before I go extinct and have to reload’*. There’s not really much I’d register as a ‘score’; in Microbe, usually I’m angling for the same approach every time (sprint to the surface, use photosynthesis for all my glucose and aerobic respiration for all my ATP, then slap a bunch of flagella and cilia on, plus a pulling cilia, to massacre cells to get through the run quicker). I measure success in terms of how fast/easy my runs are, and eventually get bored and either drop the run or go for multicellular (which is, inevitably, a slog, due to being an undeveloped stage - also, even if I do get through it, the game crashes when I move on to macroscopic).

*Went back and continued reading, saw immediately that Deus had already suggested this.

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Do you have the launcher output of those crashes?

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I posted it in the bug reports channel on the Discord, and HH has explained that it’s a Godot Engine bug, which means Thrive has no way to fix it.

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That’s why you usually read the whole thing before asking questions about it.

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In terms of more general thoughts:

  • Deus suggests that the hydrogenase->metabolosomes conversion is an important part of the oxygenation. This does not happen in the current build of Thrive. I don’t believe I’ve placed any hydrogenase in my last half-dozen runs. Of course, Deus’ plans on how to improve the Microbe stage hopefully would introduce enough of a time-span between starting and oxygenation that hydrogenase would actually come up; at the very least, I’d hope that the surface blitz stops being a thing.
  • I’m of a like mind w/ Deus in respect to the Oxygenation and Glaciation being wet fart events. Adjusting tolerances for them is easy, especially for the Glaciation, and they have minimal gameplay impact (other than, respectively, adding aerobic respiration and adding some floating hazards).
  • I like the idea of removing the oxygen tolerance slider. It makes bioluminescent vacuoles actually matter; there’s no reason to evolve them for their mechanical impact when it’s so easy to buff tolerance. Alternatively, you could keep the slider but make its MP cost much more expensive.
  • I think oxygen increases in the atmosphere remain absurd. Even in the Carboniferous, atmospheric oxygen was around 35% (according to a cursory Google search), while oxygen in Thrive regularly reaches double that. My only theory as to why oxygen skyrockets so aggressively is that auto-evo can’t rein it in when the player cell photosynthesises; but this wouldn’t happen if carbon dioxide decreased in tandem with oxygen increasing. (Instead, CO2 tends to remain more-or-less stable even as oxygen goes up towards 60-70%.)
  • Suggestion: During the glaciation, make the icons/names of the surface patches change accordingly. Some of them should become ice sheets. Making patches dynamic in this respect would make the event have much more of an impact; admittedly, it might not be possible under the current systems.
  • In addition to endosymbionts frequently going extinct, I’ve observed endosymbiosis options that, straight up, are not in the patch. Presumably, they’ve already gone extinct and the endosymbiosis button hasn’t adjusted to take it into account. Endosymbiosis would be a solved problem if an auto-evo wizard managed to make ecosystems stable, I’d imagine; it’s the constant rolling extinctions that make endosymbiosis not worth it.
  • Upgrading your cell to use organelles instead of proteins would be more fun if you could place organelles on top of matching proteins, even if this didn’t have an MP price improvement compared to not implementing any such system. I’m given to understand that even implementing this for cytoplasm was troublesome, though, and might be more troublesome if part-on-other-part had to account for what part you were trying to place. (In an ideal world, dynamic MP pricing would include it being cheaper to ‘merge’ adjacent proteins into their organelle form, and it being cheaper to place parts on top of existing cytoplasm.)
  • Deus’ idea of size costs isn’t really explained in depth (nor is it explained what exactly he means when he relates it to developing the nucleus), but I imagine osmoregulation is already something similar? Even just making osmo increase exponentially with cell size would probably work.
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iirc doing exactly that was too hard so the devs had to settle for the snowflake icon solution.

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Overall I think a lot of Deus’ suggestions would be best suited to a strong differentiation between Easy, Normal, and Hard mode. For instance the ‘can’t move between patches super fast’ thing. Seems like a good compromise to me.

I think a good way to deal with the essential problem of ‘photosynthesis is super easy to get and super powerful to the point where it drowns out all alternate strategies’ is maybe nerfs to photosynthesis? Enough that you can’t photosynthesise while also being a super fast apex predator, which is my go-to strategy in almost all runs. That being said, Deus is probably right that putting more effort into the non-photosynthesis strategies might solve the problem incidentally.

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So would it take multiple turns to move to a new patch?

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Do you play with “organelle unlocks” enabled, or disabled? With organelle unlocks, you can’t immediately use Metabolosomes, and Hydrogenase gives a higher amount of ATP per Glucose than Cytoplasm, 5 ATP compared to 3 ATP. Also, when oxygen increases, Metabolosmes outperform Hydrogenase in terms of ATP output, facilitating the conversion from anaerobic to aerobic metabolism with the AI.

And how would this work if you use the “Warm Little Pond” option, where you start on the surface with sunlight? Apologies if I have asked this before.

Perhaps make it an option whether Players want realistic oxygen numbers, LAWK vs. Non-Lawk. Unrealistic things can also be fun, too. I remember Players used be able to get 100% percent Oxygen in 0.7.1.0; I think I was the first person to find that out.

Also, CO2 does go down if you play as a Photosynthesizer, and I think it really goes down if you use “Experimental Settings” enabled. I believe hhyyrylainen said he did not want to make Hydrogenases and Hydrogenosomes produce Carbon Dioxide as a result of the Fermentation process, as it would be difficult to balance, and make a planet’s atmosphere mostly CO2.

Maybe to balance out the very high oxygen content, larger prevalence of fires would occur on those very high oxygen content atmosphere worlds?

Or, again, maybe make it an option whether you want the Oxygen slider, and/or mutation cost/penalty, under Non-LAWK. Let players decide if they wish to use it, or modify it. Customization difficulty options are great, as they increase the possible ways someone can play beyond just using different organelles. I wish more people would use custom difficulty options (if they already don’t do so).

Have you used the “Active Geology” and “Unstable Climate” world customization options from the latest update? These settings give events greater effect on the world, where the Global Glaciation reduces surface sunlight to around 37%. If I understand you correctly, you wish to make events even more punishing?

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Next time you have feedback, @ me! I appreciate all sorts of commentary on concepts as well as general sentiment of the game, and I encourage everyone to do the same.

Yeah, I wasn’t trying to say that population should be the goal in existing gameplay - just that, even though its presented as a way to insulate yourself from losing, we don’t do a good job of communicating how much rope is left for the player. If we truly want this to be a game about experimentation, evolution, and depth, then we need to be effective in demonstrating how much margin is there.

This has also lead me to question the “lose condition” - it is not at all impossible for a player to get stuck in a death loop if they have a poor build. Something that I’ve been pondering a bit is integrating the “become another species if you become extinct” setting more deeply across multiple difficulties. On Easy, you can go extinct however many times. On Normal, you can go extinct three times in a stage before losing. On Hard, you either only have one additional chance, or none at all.

I think one of the things that troubles me is when players self impose win conditions. That to me shows that a player isn’t being challenged enough, and results in a weird state of mind while playing the game - “I can easily do this, but that’s the same exact thing I did the past x times - let me do this just because I want to”. There’s only so much room for that line of thinking before a player gets bored of a game. Not telling you to stop doing that at all, by the way - just something that tells me things can do for some tweaking.

Very interesting; what do you usually do? Most players I see utilize hydrogenase. Otherwise, we can attach oxygen tolerance effects to other parts so that atleast one other metabolic pathways still goes through a bit of a need for tweaks once oxygenation shows up. Ultimately though, I think hydrogenase’s whole gambit will be “this is a very convenient early game way to burn glucose, but it requires a lot of work once oxygen shows up”.

On pacing - I think we can look at ways to slow down how rapidly oxygen accumulates. Once oxygen shows up in your environment, it can take, I don’t know, two or three generations for you to start justifying metabolosomes? Beyond that, looking at migration more in depth could be another polishing option to consider.

I think we can look at making glaciation much more devastating to sunlight, or maybe increasing chunk spawning. If we get more art assets for terrain and the such, larger ice hazards might also be a cool think to give glaciation some character. The oxygenation event is a larger conversation about metabolism and sliders that is discussed throughout this post.

I think the best solution would be to have the oxygen slider have a max that can cover an unexpected fluctuation, but not high enough of a resistance to allow you to roll out a hydrogenase/anoxygenic organism without much concern because you spent a lot of MP.

I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of mechanic which automatically reduces oxygen once it reaches a certain point, but that it isn’t balanced well currently. That’s something balancing could help, which hopefully is just tweaking a variable or two.

Endosymbiosis is a cool mechanic because it smoothly integrates a “kill X number of things to unlock a reward” mechanic into a game about microbiology. I think we can look at shortening the time it takes to perform endosymbiosis for now if the auto-evo side of things is difficult.

Size-related costs would basically just look like an energy cost once you start getting larger, forcing players to manage size and be selective with what they add to their microbe. I wanted to separate that from the osmoregulation cost because it would be confusing if both the effect of your mass and your basal osmoregulation cost was combined. If separated, players could more easily determine what the actual impact of that additional size cost is, and make more clear decisions on where they accept additional size or reject it.

As to its connection to the nucleus - it’s a concept where the nucleus eases the rate at which size-related cost increases. If your a bacterium trying to scale up, the marginal increase with size would be much more strict compared to the marginal increase with size of a eukaryote.

I am just a bit wary of having too many of our mechanics turning on or off depending on the difficulty because it can make things more difficult to properly balance, and can have consequences when it comes to things like guides, tips, tutorials, etc. when it comes to a tutorial. If possible, I’d rather that all mechanics are present across all difficulties, but are balanced so that there is more forgiveness or strictness depending on the player’s preferences.

Part of me thinks that if I had a magic button, I’d have there be less of an “Easy Normal Hard” dichotomy and instead having one base, tailored, and crafted level of difficulty with more or less attempts/lives across difficulties. Kind of like how in KSP, the actual crafting of a ship is consistent across every “difficulty” and doesn’t get easier on the player, but players have the ability to make a crash much less punishing for their operations. That could easily be a flawed perspective however - Civilization, another renowned sandbox game, has difficulty levels, and it can accommodate players very well.

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Great idea! Could we also have it when a cell dies in an Ice Shelf biome (or in a biome turned into an Ice Shelf during Global Glaciation), it generates ice chunks, since the cell contents act as nucleation centers for ice formation?

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Would that be 1 icechunk for each cellpart?

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For balancing, probably make it one ice chunk per dead cell. Maybe larger the cell size, the larger probability of the possible size of the ice chunk generated…

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I’ve also observed that endosymbiosis doesn’t cancel upon the extinction of the targeted species

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I noticed the same thing when trying out Endosymbiosis again last week.

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Did it also happen to you that you needed to travel through many patches “chasing” the target species as it went extinct in each patch you landed on after 1 turn?

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Yes. I did. But by the time I catch up to the endosymbiont species in a patch, that species already went extinct.

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Same with me. Not sure if this is just an exaggerated memory but I recall endosymbiosis was a lot easier when it was first added…

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Endosymbiosis was easier before the miche system was added. Also, to get back on topic, what do you think about Deus’s suggestion of not being immediately able to move patches in order to help species specialize?

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I suppose this would make the progression of “getting where you want to be” extend over more/most of the microbe stage, which certainly would be an improvement over the way it is currently.