So from the discussion i’ve heard, the ai will not be able to overtake the player in most of the stages like cell - late multicellular , aware - society, society - space, etc. This thread will be about if the ai has no such restriction and can overtake you all the way to ascension and what that gameplay may look like because of this. Since this probably won’t be added to the game, go crazy.
This is a drawing I made a while ago. On the left is a concept of the player in the late multicellular/aware getting hunted by a hunting party in awakening. The other is the player stumbling on an industrial/society stage city (at the top of the page).
My multicellular/aware vs awakening - space stage ideas
the player being able to explore cities and watch their ruin
the player sneeking onto spaceships and spreeding to other planets, likely being highly dependent on the continued existence of sapient infrastructure and therefore only surviving for 1 or 2 editor cycles
The player being helplessly caught in interstellar wars or raids and having the exitesnional dread of the planet being glassed, bombed, or simply carelessly made unliveble at any givin moment
Being tamed!
My cell/microscopic vs late multicellular - awakening ideas
a random chance for a macroscopic organism to swim by, chucking the player across the map at a thousand miles an hour
a random chance for a patch to appear representing the skin or inside of a macroscopic organism, the patch travels around leeding you to patches you would have never got to otherwise
getting eaten by a macroscopic organism either dying instantly or being sent to that macroscopic patch whether you like it or not
My awakening stage vs society - space stage ideas
convincing the local society you’re sapient
getting your hands/claws/flippers/teeth on some very advanced weaponry
fighting a war against people with nukes only armed with the energy weapons you stole
I beleive that NPC overtaking should be a toggleable possibility.
That way, players who want to play non-casually can have their preferred game style, while more casual players can have theirs.
It all comes down to the developer’s say, though.
Take it away, @hhyregeigarogeian!
(as in, give your two cents)
I’ll just point out again that if you are a microbe, and a single editor session is 50-100 million years, that’s enough for a sentient species to win the game. So the AI overtaking the player by much will be an immediate “game over” state within a single editor cycle.
I assume what you mean by the player “losing” the game and the ai “winning” is that the ai ascends first, which I think can easily be fixed by simply allowing multiple species to ascend, that has its own problems though because that can result in hundreds of gods very quickly. Which can result in a much more volatile or simply unplayable game.
Another option is having it toggleable and simply not caring, then telling the player before hand they may not be able to ascend.
The last option could simply be not allowing the ai to ascend before the player catches up. I didn’t really think about this much because I’m the kind of player that never really cares about winning the game, for the longest time I’ve forgotten minecraft even has a win condition and I still never even set foot in the end legitimately.
It would be hilarious if, when you toggled the option you could be given an out of nowhere “You have angered the gods” type warning in society stage in your ‘realistic’ evolution game, and then actually get a biblical plague or something.
I’ve found the quote! Now the solution to this would either be A, makeing the ai unable to destroy/make the planet unliveble until the player atleast becomes macroscopic (it’s much more fun seeing the world end when you’re in the middle of it) or B once again not caring and warning player about it once toggled. I still don’t know why I’m arguing about viability because I have no hope of this being added.
Anyway
With bigger time gaps the sapient species will most likely have a much higher chance of making themselves go extinct, so many species may come and go while only being a blip in your radar. The auto-evo would also have to be very simplistic for such beings, maybe even reducing them to a list of events for one editor cycle or two, if they’re lucky they could leave the planet becoming a spacefaring race you meet later on, or even taking your species with them, resulting in you surviving events like the sun exploding.
I think that the concept of ascended precursor aliens being gods would be interesting. Perhaps a DLC, or a special toggleable condition.
I definitely think AI should be always allowed to overtake the player, up until the Awakening stage. There is a simple reason for this.
There are many, many habitats defined by life. If you’re always the first macroscopic life, if you’re always at the forefront of the game, you’ll never get opportunities to, say, evolve to live on land in a swamp teeming with life. And, maaaaybe, if you leave it long enough, you could try evolving to be a decomposer in dead trees. That might be an interesting environment. I’m not sure.
It’s definitely outside what is reasonable for Thrive to stick around even longer in the First Ring of Development Hell to make sure that you can play a microbe in an organism’s gut, bloodstream, or corpse. But hey! That would be cool.
In any case, organisms need to be able to outpace the player to land, since if there’s no food on land, players who aren’t plants will suffer extremely.
I think, if you wanted to implement precursor races, Protist has the right idea. Toggling that setting might just mean that, if macroscopic creatures evolve quickly enough, they can occasionally proc a couple random events, such as:
‘Nuclear war’ - A patch-continent becomes irradiated for three steps (300m years is a very long time for irradiation but you’d just have to ignore that).
‘Ascension’ - A precursor species ascends to godhood and leaves no trace on the world. They can interact with you at times but won’t unduly alter the world.
‘Ruins’ - Precursor species leaves behind a bunch of ruins you can scavenge for resources.
Would add a nice degree of variety to things. Dunno about the full implementation, but it could work.
If I were implementing NPC sapients, I’d run with the interpretation that our style of sapience is unstable and always collapses either into ascension or extinction. That would work well. You could have it so that the alien sapients have one timestep they affect, and serve as a ‘mass extinction’ threat.
Random mass extinctions are a cool idea (should also be on a toggle), but that’s not for here.
TL;DR: The auto-evo should be allowed to evolve ahead of you all the way to Aware. Auto-evo awakening should be on a toggle, and it would end up being a few events mentioned in the editor’s species screen (as ‘Events’, which could also contain the message that your species has prospered/decayed due to your activity).
Currently, the ai can already overtake the player within the cell stage, by getting a nucleus. The main thing to add would be having the player able to then benefit from the ai overtaking them, for example by becoming a bacteria that feeds on eukaryotic species. The ai should then also be able to fill in niches presented by the player overtaking them, having them become the bacteria after the player becomes a eukaryote. I think the simplest thing to focus on for the player being overtaken then, is hostile bacteria: germs; I believe this simply because it is the only thing with a possibility of being worked on with the way the game is currently, aside from maybe adding parasites to the multicellular stage as it is right now.
