Predation

In earths history, multicellular organisms arose as peaceful, non-carnivorous species. Until predators evolved, most of these creatures were soft blobs, with no real complexity, simply because they didn’t need to be complex. As soon as predators evolved, the herbivores began to start an arms race, developing more and more complex defensive strategies, while the carnivores adapted to eat these new creatures.
The real question that concerns thrive, is that if no other species mutates to consume flesh, will the player have to start that chain reaction in order to become more complex? And if so, the players species will become the common ancestor, which is kind of cool and exiting.

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Creatures evolve to filled the niches of the planet. If there is an abundance of one type of food (meat from all those tasty herbivores) and too many creature contesting for that one type of food then some would evolve to exploit that potential food source.

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Double post:
That being said it would be interesting if the player was forced into another niche. Let’s say that the player is trying to play as an herbivore but the auto-evo resulted in a bunch of other herbivore species to evolve and the player is having a hard time contesting. The player might be forced to find a different type of food or die due to competition. The game should make the player have to evolve around their surrounds not the surroundings evolve around the player.

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Did you just double post in less than 10 minutes time? Just edit your posts dude…

I prefer not switching direction in the same post.
The first one was simply an explanation of how niches work while the other was talking about game mechanics and the auto-evo forcing the player to find a different niche. They are different things meant to be read separately.

On a slightly unrelated but related note, I was going through a National Geographic article for a project which triggered me to make this post, and I came about an image with several different Cambrian creatures. And they’re just so different from what we have here on earth that it raises the question; “if a different creature was dominant, one with 5 eyes per se, how would the rest of our pre-history be affected?”

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Yeah interesting. I guess sometimes design choices become locked in. Like DNA using 4 base letters is locked into all life so must have been chosen very early on and is very hard to change. I guess maybe number of eyes is easier to change over time as there are many creatures with different amounts.

Re first predators I loved it when watching Kinesis stream when he first heard the toxin sound and freaked out. We are conditioning everyone nicely, I am scared of that sound for sure ha ha.

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Well everything would have five eyes. The reason that we have two is because that’s all that’s needed to our survival. But if for some reason you needed three or five eyes then that would be the dominant species. Why do we have heads instead of a body with a mouth and eyes looking in all directions? It takes less energy to have a head that can look around rather than having eyes everywhere.

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Someone sayed about opabinia? As I know, first predators in Cambrian - conodontaophoras. And in Cambrian were many interesting creatures like pikaias or sprigginas. And before the occurrence of conodontophoras, were jellyfish, sponges and hydras. You are right

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