Ok, so this is what I know so far:
Microbe stage: self-explanitory
Multicellular stage: Is this an “aquatic stage” or a “cell colony” stage? If it’s the latter, I have a lot of ideas that could help.
Aware stage: Is this the “creature stage”? Land or water?
Awakening stage: Is this supposed to be a “hunter-gatherer” stage? Do you play as a single individual who has to survive while crafting tools and weapons to survive and find a mate?
Society stage: Will this be Bronze age society? Or Middle Ages? Or all of it? City-states?
Industrial stage: If society stage is society up to an “industrial revolution”, will this be entire civilizations/nations?
Space stage: self-explanitory.
As far as I know, this is a summary of how it goes:
Microbe Stage- you control a single cell
Multicellular Stage- you control a colony of cells
Aware Stage-you control an advanced organism, could be aquatic or terrestrial
Awakening Stage-you control a sapient creature and eventually form a tribe
Society Stage- your tribe becomes a larger community and eventually forms a nation. The technology level could be anything before the industrial age
Industrial Age-actually quite similar to Society, just more advanced technology and on a larger scale
Space Stage-pretty self-explanatory
The plan for the game is that the transition between the stages will be very gradual, and there won’t be a clear cut line between them, they will sorta blend into the next. Like for example I’ve heard that in the very early multicellular stage it won’t just suddenly go 3D, as your creature gets bigger and more complex it transitions from 2D to 3D, giving you more camera movement. So there will definitely be some connections between the early stages and late stages.
Yeah, my only complaint with this is that society stage should be a city-state that progresses from “bronze-age” through late middle ages and then forms a nation, becoming the Industrial Stage and it’s from 1800s through the near future, because the nation mechanic could mirror the progression from microbial to multicellular, except instead of going from one cell to many, its one city to many in a nation against many other nations.
The official information is on the wiki: What is Thrive? - Thrive
That is a link to a brief summary of all the stages. The individual pages have more information. Though, the wiki doesn’t get a lot of love so it has some a bunch of outdated information.
The split goes so that the start of multicellular stage is when you are a colony of cells. The end of multicellular is when you develop a brain and become aware of yourself (hence the name aware stage).
That includes a bunch of stuff, so I’ve been using the terms early multicellular to refer to cell colonies and late multicellular to refer to when the player is a huge number of cells and no longer place them individually (instead using a tissue editor).
Society stage is planned to start once the player builds the first society center (a village center building) and they move on to a strategic view and are then able to control all members of their species in an RTS style. This is probably the biggest disconnect between any of the stages.
It ends after reaching industrial revolution.
The player obviously starts with a single society center. But I find it hard to imagine that a city would develop before the player starts expanding their territory. Just like in a modern nation the capital city isn’t technologically more advanced than rest of the country (though it takes time for new innovations to spread). But something like a modern city surrounded by not even tribal villages would be highly unrealistic.
i think the best example of how the transition of stages will work is when your prokaryote cell becomes eukaryote, i consider that a stage transition and likely how the others will work.
IIRC the way it’s explained on the wiki, the strategic view is unlocked in the awakening stage, when its specific bit of ‘tech’ has been discovered. At that point you can choose to go in strategic view, yet it’s often a good idea to walk around yourself for a while too. (Think early-game glitterworld adventurer Rimworld vs late-game, in the start you’ll often play with your only troop and min-max his actions as much as you can, while later on it’ll be better to work large-scale, since you have too many pawns to min-max each one of them.)
That would be a pretty cool feature and probably the reason it was written down is that it does reduce the jump between the stages. However it takes a bunch more work to make the strategy stages work both when commanding units around and doing stuff yourself. Though, I’d like to eventually see that better transition added.