Sessile slider affecting gameplay speed idea

[thriveuser1454 (Occasional Thrive Player)]

As of now, behavior is a pretty empty mechanic. It does affect how cells play, but changing your species’ behavior doesn’t affect you in any way. Also, the auto-evo apparently doesn’t account for the behavior levels.
Sessile players who play plants have the issue that it takes forever for them to passively acquire enough resources to divide. Therefore, I suggest that the Sessile/Motile slider should affect the game speed while outside editor. More sessile, the game runs faster. More motile, the game runs slower.
Is this feasible?

[hhyyrylainen]

Theoretically it is possible but there are some hard limits in what range of speeds is possible. Simulating at over normal speed requires more CPU power to process more physics updates (the other alternative would be to make physics simulation steps depend on the speed which is a massive pain and generally always recommended to not be done). And simulating at lower speed will at some point make the gameplay really choppy. So there is a hard lower and higher limits. I haven’t tested but I’d guess something like 0.5-3x speed would be a doable range.

Not to mention how many places in the game would need to be verified that they work correctly when the logic step size is increased or lowered (though I estimate this to be pretty minor compared to the above points).

Would anyone really want to use such a slider though? It’d increase the amount of time Thrive takes to complete a lot. Or alternative it’d make things harder to react to. My guess is that everyone would crank the slider to max speed if they weren’t going for a toxin shooting build, because that just lets’ you play faster. So to me this feature seems like something everyone who knew, would just always crank to max speed so it wouldn’t be very interesting gameplay element (as there’s no choice to be made, just crank speed to max to reduce waiting times).

[thriveuser1454 (Occasional Thrive Player)]

Well, fine then. I suppose there won’t be any real way to make plant a fun playstyle. Unless sessile/motile also massively affects your movement speed…

[hhyyrylainen]

There’s a whole separate thread where plant gameplay is talked about:

Plant gameplay

I think if you play as a plant then the game should act different then as an animal, I don’t know how maybe it could be like plague inc or something similar. But you guys need to make it interesting not just something that’s implemented just to be implemented and doesn’t add anything to the game, make it a realistic choice the player could make and have fun with.

Here’s my really short summary for what the plan is for plant gameplay (after microbe stage):

Plant gameplay

That’s basically been the idea forever to fix the plant gameplay. Basically throw the player into a customized strategy view early where they manage the spread of their plant species instead of playing as an individual plant in a waiting simulator.