Ah, I think I see what you mean now. So like the auto-evo results would still be “open” when you get to the editor? And as a result the player could modify their species and only then confirm the results which would then get re-calculated with the modified player.
Theoretically that is doable but as a programmer I need to say that the code architecture really doesn’t flex like that so it would be a lot of effort needed to make the map etc. work with a temporary results overlay on top of the confirmed and stored data.
What you suggest would entirely flip the advantage to the player side. Which I think is already there because the player is an intelligent designer. So I worry that we’ll be back in the situation where people would say that auto-evo is ineffective at making competitive species at all.
I mean you can calculate new populations quickly, but the mutations part of the algorithm generates a ton of attempts at mutations, but it only keeps the good ones. If the player is allowed to go “umm akshually” after the mutations are generated and picked, many of the picked mutations might turn out to actually be bad and it would have been better to pick mutations that initially didn’t seem as good.
Only to the patch you played in, because that’s the only patch you’ve proven that your species can survive.
This has been a pretty consistent feedback over the years that players are in a situation where auto-evo just wants them extinct. Actually with the miche changes we have seen much less of that. It could be that there’s less new players trying the game or the improvement being so big that everyone just talks about that.
If this had been brought up like 2 years ago then I’d see this having a pretty good chance to be put on the roadmap for the microbe stage to still rework this part. But now this would cause the goal of finishing microbe stage soon to slip so I don’t see this getting done unless some programmer volunteers a month of their time to get this change done technically and balanced.