Not sure if this normal or not, but the player cell only speciates once, at 100 mya, the first time i enter the editor. Never again, through the entire playthrough does it speciate in any way. How do i stop this from happening? It really takes some fun away, because i barely compete with anything after i thrive. Is there some option i need to enable or disable?
1 Like
Welcome to the forums.
It’s never guaranteed when your species will have another branch off of it. It usually happens at the first 100 million years mark, but not always. It’s based on random chance. As long as there aren’t too many species in a patch, one might have a branch split off from it. There’s a limit to how many new species can appear at any time, and the species with the highest population are most likely to be selected. The player’s species isn’t treated any differently than the other species, afaik, so the more species there are in the game world, the less likely the player will have another split.
Basically, get your population as high as possible, and avoid patches with more than 10 species in them, and you should get more splits from your species before very long.
2 Likes
Thank you for answering quickly, I really appreciate it 
Is this actually true? I seem to recall writing the code so that the biodiversity filling species has a uniform chance to appear from any existing species, that random selection is not weighted by population.
It should be, so that very successfull generalists will end up specializing more often
1 Like
I was talking about auto-evo’s internals. I doubt that there’s actually anyone on these forums who is able to discuss it as knowing the difference between: species splitting due to selection pressure in contrast to biodiversity fill new species split off would be required to have a conversation about this topic.
I did just verify in the code that the biodiversity fill split doesn’t take population into account, but I also noticed that it doesn’t check the species to split in random order for the current patch (for neighbouring patch splits it does go in random order). I might make a quick change to make also that within a single patch biodiversity splitting to go in random order.
I seem to remember someone on the forum saying that population is taken into account, but I guess they just assumed it was so. Going into more patches makes it more likely the species will have a split though, right?
Well this is the only way that a split due to differing selection pressure can happen. I need to point out, though, that the player is immune from having their species splitting.
Meaning that the player’s population isn’t decreased by a new species being created from it, while other species are?
Yes, other species can lose half of their population in a single cycle due to that part splitting off as separate species. For quite obvious reasons the player’s wouldn’t feel good about that, so it is just prevented. It would be quite a challenge run for a player to make their species successful in auto-evo while avoiding losing a ton of population areas the player wants to keep without them splitting off.