Lets say someone was taking a while to develop or get to the requirements to make their species sentient, like they were trying to get the species to evolve camouflage, would there be a possibility that an AI Species would become sentient before the species? Would you get a game over or be at a disadvantage?
I’d say it depends on how close you are to sentience. If you are too far away, the other species will evolve a global civilization before you become sentient and will most likely domesticate or eradicate your species. If you can enter sentience just a little bit behind, I think you could still beat them.
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Oh! I never thought about that. If Thrive is eventually capable of that, I would be greatly pleased. Like in Crusader Kings 2, the world should not exist for the player. Rather, it should exist in spite of the player.
I wonder how that would work with the stages’ differing timescales, though. The development of civilization is extremely rapid on an evolutionary scale (thousands instead of millions of years), so would the entire history of the civilization happen during the loading screen after exiting the editor? There might be no sign of sentience in the world, and suddenly a game over appears after evolving due to a sentient species having eradicated the player’s species.
Exactly. I’ve been talking about the timescale problem for a long, long time already. My opinion on how to handle this is to have like a bar or a popup saying how close you are to losing the game unless you start catching up to the most advanced AI species. So the player has forewarning before just being told you lost the game.
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That sounds acceptable, but I wonder how the game would know whether an AI species is close to sentience. Would there be a simple number to track, i.e. a “sentience” stat? Also, I think the player should be allowed to play after a game over (unless the player went extinct, of course). Even if the player lost the game, continuing in the sandbox could be fun.
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