Agents Discussion

[hhyyrylainen]

@Titan

I would also like to mention that there should be a soft limit on how many toxins (and how much) an organism should be able to use, to prevent strategies like stunning your pray and immediately killing them with toxins. (Too easily) This doesn’t mean that this strategy should be impossible to pull off, just that it would require a lot of effort and be balanced so it’s not too op (for example limiting the rate at which toxins are produced)

I’d like to point out that there is already a limit in the game: number of toxin vacuoles determines the maximum toxin firerate, and if there isn’t much toxin stored in the firing cell the damage dealt is scaled down. So similarly these new effects can be scaled down when not enough toxin is there and normal toxin cooldown will be still in effect.

Even now with a ridiculous number of toxin vacuoles you can become a machine gun that can instantly kill cells you target.

I just wanted to point that out as I saw two comments related to this.

[Buckly]

The idea would be that they are forced to consume more ATP than they produce. So they would eventually be forced to stop to regenerate ATP.

It was just an idea I was throwing out, and I am fine with them just reducing flagella effectiveness.

[hhyyrylainen]

So in effect it would do the same thing as gradually increasing ATP generation debuff (like starting at 10% reduced ATP production up to like 50% reduction).

[hhyyrylainen]

Here’s the toxin types that I’ll start implementing now (I won’t touch the toxin production processes or oxytoxy being the default toxin^[1]):

public enum ToxinType
{
    /// <summary>
    ///   The default toxin type for now. Less effective against oxygen using species.
    /// </summary>
    Oxytoxy = 0,

    /// <summary>
    ///   A basic toxin that targets membranes. This will be the default toxin at some point.
    /// </summary>
    Cytotoxin,

    /// <summary>
    ///   A movement (base movement) inhibiting toxin
    /// </summary>
    Macrolide,

    /// <summary>
    ///   ATP production inhibiting toxin
    /// </summary>
    ChannelInhibitor,

    /// <summary>
    ///   Toxin that gets bonus damage against oxygen users (opposite of <see cref="Oxytoxy"/>)
    /// </summary>
    OxygenMetabolismInhibitor,
}

A better name for “OxygenMetabolismInhibitor” is welcome.

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1. but this has to be done eventually when the world starts off without oxygen it won’t be possible to make any toxins ↩︎

[Oliveriver]

Would cyanide work as the name for the oxygen inhibitor?

[rsaavedra]

In case someone has any doubts about how Cyanide acts on Mitochondria.

Cyanide poisoning occurs by inhibition of Complex IV of the respiratory transport chain. Complex IV is responsible for taking away electrons from (molecular) oxygen, and giving them to 4 H+ (i.e. protons), if this doesn’t occur the Citric Acid Cycle kinda collapses. In essence cyanide binds with this Complex IV protein, and prevents oxygen to bind to it, thus shutting down the Citric Acid Cycle, in other words you can breath but oxygen can’t be used.

On the other hand, there are other compounds that can affect oxygen metabolism and bioavailability, for example carbon monoxide, which binds (reversably) to hemoglobin.

[hhyyrylainen]

I’ve named that toxin type cyanide for now. Also I noticed that the toxin organelle descriptions are pretty tightly linked to Oxytoxy NT, for now I just added mention that customizing the organelle allows switching the toxin type.