And reducing Endosymbiosis by one more turn might just make it more viable again. I recall it used to be the case where the number of turns for an Endosymbiont to be turned into a Eukaryotic organelle was related to the number of the same type of Prokaryotic organelles it had. Some possible Endosymbionts, especially with a lot Thylakoids, needed only 2 turns to become a Chloroplast.
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This is still the case. The more viable candidate, the less you need to engulf it. If I recall the minimum is just 2 cycles for very suitable endosymbionts.
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Broadly, what happens in my runs is that I just… never have a need to use hydrogenase at all. I keep my cell small and undeveloped - just cytoplasm, and an anti-engulf membrane - until I reach the surface, and then it’s 2-3 generations before metabolosomes turn on and I start developing a proper metabolism.
I suppose I should probably be doing challenge runs where I don’t do surface blitz, or go after iron or sulfur as my food source, but I think Deus has a fair point that Thrive’s challenge shouldn’t all be self-imposed.
That’s probably a fair point. More customisation in difficulty on the player side = more balancing trouble on the dev side.
In relation to the endosymbiosis thing: I’m of the opinion that a lot of the current issues with gameplay fundamentally lead back to auto-evo. Endosymbionts take too long and go extinct frequently? It’s an auto-evo problem, on both counts (the endosymbionts take too long because auto-evo won’t make large prokaryotes that are more effective endosymbionts, and they go extinct frequently because auto-evo struggles to make stable ecosystems). Cells always the same? Also an auto-evo problem.
I don’t really know what the state of auto-evo is right now, but from what I’m aware of, it’s a situation where there’s only a few people who know how it works well enough to improve it, and they’ve been inactive. Correct me if I’m wrong, I’m just a… beta tester, I suppose, considering that Thrive is a beta and I’ve been playing it and mentioning problems, which probably counts as testing.
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With the way Thrive “steps” cover long spans of time, they arguably shouldn’t be stable. Distinct species just don’t last that long, especially when you are actually trying to show them evolving. Endosymbiosis also currently only tracks which one of the descendent species keeps the same name, even though a species that branches off and gets a new name is equally close to the original as “the original with a mutation without changing the name”. That’s just kind of arbitrary.
I think ultimately a big problem with the oxygen/UV tolerance sliders is that having them high is a benefit without downsides.
Almost everything else in Thrive that you can buy with MP has additional ongoing costs. Organelles have osmoregulation and reproduction cost. The different membrane types are all side-grades, same with many of the upgrades. Even the temperature and pressure sliders have a cost: putting them at one position means your species doesn’t do well at others.
I think you could easily give the oxygen/UV tolerance sliders some ongoing (osmoregulation?) cost per hex so that they’re only worth improving when you actually need them.
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From a gameplay standpoint, having half the patch go extinct every round doesn’t make for the most interesting patches, since no complex food chain could really form. Probably a place where realism can be sacrificed. Your point about endosymbiosis being arbitrary is fair, but probably difficult to fix; a patch that makes your endosymbiosis somehow spread would rapidly strain if you let it run for a few generations.
I think that works pretty well. It can be integrated with @Deus’ idea pretty well; you could have it so that oxygen-tolerance parts don’t add an additional osmoregulation cost, unlike the slider (likewise for UV).
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This is why limiting the oxygen slider and making oxygen resistance more/mostly part based would be a good idea. As for UV tolerance, I am not sure it needs a harsh penalty, but maybe make it cost more MP to upgrade so its not an easy freebie?
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Why would cave creatures or people at high latitudes ever remove their UV resistance then?
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Why would they add it in the first place? Do people not want to use their MP for useful stuff in the patch they are currently in?
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Didn’t the base forms of cave species that migrated from the surface there and the first humans have higher UV resistance levels whilst these derived forms had those levels lowered?
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But what does that have to do with the microbe stage? When starting at the bottom of the ocean the species have 0 UV resistance to start off (though starting in a warm pond should automatically give UV resistance at the start). So there’s no added UV resistance to the player species unless the player adds it them self.
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I meant that Poodelicuses solution wouldn’t cover for the fact that species may still lose UV resistance even if there is no disadvantage to having it be at the max level.
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I frequently have points leftover after making the edits I want. So I invest them in UV and Oxygen tolerance, because there is no downside. In the end, I usually have to invest relatively few point when those tolerances actually become relevant.
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Same here. I also invest in there when heading to the surface from the vents since you usually need to invest in tolerances during that part anyways.
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Thim and GameDungeon, who are our most capable auto-evo wizards (I would think atleast), do keep engaged to be fair. The thing with auto-evo though is that it is easy for unintended consequences to occur, and there can be limited testing for a specific update to the algorithm. So something might work in certain saves, but not in other conditions. I am curious to see how Thim’s most recent update, focused on stabilizing ecosystems a bit more, affects the average playthrough.
My thing with a scaling effect - atleast an osmoregulation cost effect - is that the punishment for being outside of your tolerance range is already an osmoregulation debuff. So a system that applies an osmoregulation penalty for being both too adapted and too unadapted could be a turnoff for some players. I guess you could balance it so that the osmoregulation debuff isn’t too bad on the “too adapted” side of things, but I do think that at that point, the argument for restricting the oxygen tolerance range is a bit stronger and more convenient for both developers and players. Perhaps there could be another sort of cost we think of.
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So the fear is that it would feel weird to have the cost of the slider, and the cost of not having it, both cause a simple osmoregulation cost, would feel weird? It’s kind of similar to how the other tolerance sliders work. Though I suppose in this case each point on the slider would always have a cost, that is only worth if it is preventing a bigger penalty from not having the tolerance.
Could also be fixed by taking a different cost, or changing the effect of the “damage” caused by not having tolerance, but I struggle to think of another potential “cost”.
And really, my main problem is that as long as there is no ongoing cost at all, I am always going to spend spare MP on increasing these sliders because it’s the optimal thing to do (with no downsides), even though logically I am not yet experiencing any evolutionary pressure for it.
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Well there is not much that can be done to prevent players from not acting like the autoevo algorithm without that being too restrictive/annoying.
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Right, one of the main points with tolerances was that it gives some way to dump a few extra MP rather than forcing players to waste them.
However, new players will have no clue that this is what they should do. Thus if we make the sliders way more expensive to change, we are going to screw over new players specifically in a big way, which is not something I want to do.
My idea would be to make it increase something relatively minor like reproduction cost could up by 1% per 1% of oxygen resistance in the slider. That way you wouldn’t unnecessarily want to add 20% extra cost to your cell’s reproduction, you would then only add it when you truly need it. But the drawback would be that if the effect is too big then playing on the surface would be annoying due to the increased gameplay cycle length, or if the cost was too minor we would still be in the exact same situation this tried to solve.
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By the way, would we want the UV tolerance drawback to be the same as the oxygen tolerance drawback or for it to be something else?
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I completely agree for that reason that increasing the MP cost is not the way to go. I think (especially for new players) getting locked in a “losing scenario” because you didn’t see coming that you need to prepare UV/Oxygen resistance would not be a fun experience.
Hmmm, the problem indeed is that reproduction cost is more of a “tedium increase” than a challenge. Since all it does is extend the time before you can return to the editor, it’s only a challenge increase if every second of staying alive is a challenge. (though I guess it affects population numbers too).
This is why my mind went to “osmoregulation cost” first, since it is a cost you feel more directly in the challenge.
Could be different just for variety. But comparing them for IRL mechanics:
UV resistance seems to mainly come from increased investment in DNA repair mechanisms and pigmentation. (which reminds me that melanosomes could increase UV resistance, hmmmm)
Oxygen resistance seems most importantly caused by the production of enzymes (proteins) that convert the dangerous forms of oxygen.
So both of those IRL take some resources (repro cost?) and energy (osmoregulation?). But perhaps the balance is a bit different. Pigmentation seems like something that requires more production and less ongoing energy, but that’s just guessing.
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It already does.
I had the same idea when adding the feature so I added that already when adding the other tolerance effects organelles have.
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