Heya! Just joined, so sorry if this has already been discussed a lot, as symbiosis is a well known fact of species interactions, but I thought it would be fun to explore this concept more.
I remember spore had a very…silly way of gaining allies, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Rather than that, it would be more like real life in the beginning.
In microbe stage, this may be rather minimal, as the cells aren’t sentient. However, maybe there could be an instance similar to the theory that the mitochondria in human cells was actually a separate species that was “eaten”, yet was kept as it proved useful for the cells survival.
In aware, it would reflect real life for the most part. Two species become inter-dependent for survival, or to increase chances of survival. This could be heavily strategy based. For example, players will prey-type animals could form symbiotic relationships with tougher species, to buff up defense or gain a sort of intimidation. Predator type players could gain prey symbiotic relationship to clear parasites/bugs off their creature, or to access new hunting grounds, such as the wolves in real life who befriended a colony of baboons. ( https://www.google.com/search?q=baboons+wolves&oq=bamboons&aqs=chrome.3.69i57j0l5.5790j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)
I guess it would get less realistic as we moved onto the other stages, as we would be creeping closer to speculation.
In civilization/industrial, sure, they could become pets. Which I would love! They could provide happiness and moral support for our species, as well as inspiration, as humans did when designing airplanes (by observing birds). Yet I think it would also be neat if a civilization housing two sentient races was possible. The downsides of this though, are the lack of real life examples to draw from, possible lack of realisticness, and accidentally making the player a tad OP. But if we focused more on opening pathways that were otherwise shut off through this symbiosis, rather than putting it all into gained stats and abilities, then I think it should work out well enough.
What does everyone else think? Is this silly or has potential? Would it be realistic to hope that some may make it into the game, or would it be too much work? Or, if we’re just focusing on the idea for now, do you think it would be fun overall, or would it not change the game that much at all in terms of enjoyment?
Possibilities Considering Symbiosis
The idea of symbiosis is cool one of my favourite examples is hermit crabs and anemones the hermit crabs are the only creature that can coax an anemone to unstick from the ground its on Cause it will be place on the shell of the crab the crab helps the anemone feed from bits off food drifting about from its feedinggs and the anemone helps the crab by stinging predators though hermit crabs dont always do the symbiosis thing with anemones so i doubt there can be an entire civilisation based around that though that reminds me of the Zoq Fot Pik from star control
Another symbiosis is with the anemone and the clown fish. The clown fish will have another fish or other swim towards the harmful anemone, and once the prey is down, they both feed upon it.
I think this is neat! Imagine playing a predator, and gaining access to other predators trying to hunt your prey buddies. The player would get the extra food source, and the prey would be protected! Like with your fish example, the prey would lure the enemies to the player’s creature, which we would then hunt.(Or the other way around for players with prey species.) Maybe it would even make us better communicators.
Yeah these are really nice ideas.
For the microbe stage we are already working on having membrane bound organelles locked until you have a nucleus to reflect the symbiotic origins, though we could do more. The predator prey relationship you talk about could be a microbe thing too, such as small ammonia producing bacteria which hang around large photosynthesizers, that would be interesting.
Re society you could argue that civilisation is a symbiotic relationship between many species. Plants (wheat, rice, fruits and vegetables etc), animals (horse, cow, pig, dog, elephant etc) and humans all working together and sharing resources.
Re having two sentient species that kind of happened in Earth’s history, there were Homo Sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovians and more alive at the same time, they interbred and competed to become what we have now. It’s not such a stretch that if the Americas had become cut off earlier they could have been discovered to be full of Neanderthals, which would have been a crazy discovery!
Cool ideas, symbiosis is a great theme for Thrive.