Currently, they are in the very fun state wherein stacking them results in a ridiculous level of vortexing which allows you to genocide all the teeny cells. I’m even big enough now that smaller eukaryotes can get eaten too.
Unfortunately, this is also completely broken and wildly unbalanced. I know there’s a Github initiative to cap the power; I think that would be a good idea. I suggest a logarithmic or logistic growth to the power of the vortex cilia.
I fully agree. Pulling cilia could be also balanced by vastly increasing the amount of ATP consumed when they are active.
Pulling cilia does have a natural counter, which is the small cells evolving spikes which will require you to be careful with what you pull in or otherwise you may die really fast.
Oh, yeah, I did notice the spikes things. Does auto-evo make cells evolve spikes if you use pulling cilia?
The cilia are still super powerful, though. As long as you turn them off when a spike boi shows up, you can get tons of food - at least for a few generations. And they’re otherwise pretty cheap.
Not specifically, but the AI can evolve them against predators in general as a defensive mechanism.
There’s a ton of evolutionary pressures that could be added or expanded upon in the auto-evo system but not many people want to program the actual improvements.
I guess toxins also work as a mean of defense.
Speaking of toxins, does toxin type affect effects on the engulfer yet?
It doesn’t. I commented on discord after the 0.7.1 release:
It would be a ton more complicated if ingestion toxin damage would need to be specialized per toxin type (but internally in the game only “toxin” compound exists, so the digestion process would need to constantly check the organelles the eaten species has and adjust fractionally the toxin effects from the eaten toxin to match it to the upgrades the organelles in the engulfed cell are).
Ah I see. Another feature left for post-ascension development.