Will multicellular be open world or patch map based?

Planetary time limit would be realistic, but ultimately… not really very relevant. I’d put it in as a miscellaneous setting for Medium and Hard difficulty, maybe with a slider, but once you make it out of the Microbe stage, your generations are a lot less game time. Every stage up would further reduce that.

However, if you made it out of the Microbe stage without much time left, then it could remain a pressing concern throughout the game. I still think it would overemphasise the Microbe stage too much; if you ran it fast, the time limit would be irrelevant, while if you ran it slow, you wouldn’t have any opportunity to regain time in later stages.

Softening the concept into a generalised stage time limit would be more interesting, I think, as a difficulty setting. Not quite adhering to the actual basis of the stellar life span, but instead, you get, say, 20 generations for each stage, and if you run out of time, it’s a game over, or the game difficulty rapidly increases.

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I’m pretty sure that Thrive shouldn’t have such hard time limits, especially as these do not exist in real life.
I can guess that the difficulty can increase after some point, but how would that work?

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Yeah I don’t think thats a good idea. Preferably, atleast in harder game modes, the game would just have one overarching time-limit, your sun exploding. A stage could get a bit more difficult if you played in said stage for a long enough time, like the environment getting much hotter for example. I don’t really know other conditions that a ‘about to explode star’ would give a planet though.

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Perhaps atmosphere being blown away and more radiation?

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