Beginning and Ending of the Multicellular Stage

[Rathalos]

On the Microbe to Multicellular transition:

@hhyyrylainen

I personally think that the end of the microbe stage is fine, I don’t see a major need to modify the condition of the player demonstrating they know how to use the binding agent to go to the next stage.

I am afraid I do disagree. The transition right now is barebones enough that I always assumed it was a placeholder.

My main issue is that “colony gameplay” essentially is not a thing. You unlock the binding agents, place them, and the only reason you use the binding mechanic is to grab 4 other cells and transition. Seems like a bit of a waste of a mechanic, might as well have made placing the binding agent immediately put you in the multicellular editor and spared the effort.

I do recognise we declared the microbe stage finished and we don’t want to open that can again. But I always considered colonies to be multicellular-adjacent and figured they were a bit of an exception here, since quite some of the currently discussed plans also affect colonies. But I agree that any changes here should be carefully considered “minimal effort changes for high impact”, if that makes sense.

@Deus

• Placing and Upgrading Parts to Grant Multicellular Abilities

@Rathalos suggested a potential upgrade path for binding agents which grants stronger and stronger colonial benefits, and/or the placement of parts which confer Multicellular-required abilities/processes.

This is pretty intuitive for the player, and is pretty easy to conceptualize and balance. However, we don’t have a traditional upgrade system “path” mechanic in the game, and we need to be wary of providing too much clutter within a cell, the editor, or having too much of a “collect-all-parts” meta towards the end of the Microbe Stage.

Our options are a bit limited because we don’t have unlock conditions on upgrades (otherwise creating a chain on binding agents would actually be quite simple).

I think if we do go this route, we don’t have to go overboard with it. You could for example have one upgrade on the binding agent (too expensive in ATP to buy in the same editor session), and an organelle that is unlocked after several editor sessions of having that binding agent upgrade. (or even skip that upgrade and just have one organelle unlocked by having the binding agents)

Like I said before: just give some reason for colonial gameplay to actually be an evolutionary step, rather than it lasting less than one generation.

@hhyyrylainen

@Deus

• Reach a Certain Number of Bound Organisms, But Cost of Binding is Expensive

ATP cost which grows with the number of bound cells. So binding with 1 cell costs 5 ATP, binding with 2 costs 10 ATP, binding with 3 costs 15, binding with 4 costs 20, etc.

This is the opposite of many planned benefits where more cells in a colony are purely good so to me it would be super weird to first punish the player for a big colony and once they get through the penalty then they unlock a bunch of benefits that just help when making a bigger colony.

I have to agree with Hhnyyrylainen here that it would be weird to add additional costs onto binding/making colonies when we are already struggling to make it look beneficial at all.

Only exception would be if the costs start off as very small/essentially negligible and only become prohibitive at the size “we don’t want players to get this large before macroscopic”.

@Deus

Ideas

In case we want minimal work/really don’t want to get into Microbe Stage-exclusive mechanics again, but can also agree that the transition should still be smoothed out a bit, maybe we can look at changing the condition just a little bit without adding whole new mechanics?

Examples:

• The “transition to multicellular: x/5 cells” button only appears Y generations after you add the binding agent.
• As above but after you bind something for the first time.
• You need to reach the colony size requirement for Y generations before you can click the button.

(Currently you need to have the nucleus for 5 turns before you unlock the binding agents. That could be cut down a bit if overall Microbe Stage length becomes too long)

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On the Multicellular to Macroscopic transition:

@Deus

• Placing Down Specific Parts that are ATP Expensive

Kind of like placing down a nucleus, placing down certain parts in the late-multicellular. Pretty uniform to the Microbe Stage, but kind of repetitive and maybe not the most realistic.

To expand a bit on this, rather than only having specific organelles that need to be placed down, you need to have whole specific cell types. Those would of course be decided by specific placed organelles, but ones that are mutually exclusive with other functions. It distinguishes from Microbe Stage in some way because you need different cell types to complete this objective.

An example I gave before is specialised reproductive cells, which as far as I am aware basically all complex multicellular organisms have (even if they don’t all have a germline like animals). I’m still looking for a good candidate for cell part to designate a cell as reproductive. It’s complicated a bit because IRL these are all about gametes for sexual reproduction. Which we don’t necessarily have in Thrive yet (and might not require), but IRL even single-celled eukaryotes do.

I am afraid that completely ignoring any “function-based” requirements during the Multicellular Stage could have some weird effects going into the Macroscopic Stage, with starting organisms not having the things we would expect them to have. In this case, reproductive organs.

We’re also still telling a story of biology, so I think making sure we include some critical IRL phenomena is a good goal, just like with the nucleus in the Microbe Stage.

@Deus

• Adjacency Bonus Goal

@hhyyrylainen

I think @Rathalos said something about wanting to change the “20 cells to proceed” criteria to be something else. Maybe it could be reworded like you need at least 3 cell types (that are placed) and that you have at least 5 cells with a +10% modifier from adjacencies. Or something like that that you need to actually design stuff to advance?

I think this could be quite interesting if specified a bit more. At least it fully guarantees players are using the mechanics. It could even be used in combination with other requirements.

A potential pitfall would be that if not implemented carefully, players could be designing their organism purely to hit the requirement, rather than to make it actually perform well.

@hhyyrylainen

@Deus

Size-Criteria

You progress once you reach a certain size, similar to how it is now. Pretty on the nose for becoming “macroscopic” and simple, but could be rather bland. Current implementation would definitely have to be altered a bit as well.

The reason why I made my suggestion is that some team members were complaining that the end condition was too simple and easy to rush for the player.

I think the size criteria can be salvageable if two requirements are met:

• Blocking you from growing in size too fast. For example, having placing additional cells be more expensive compared to all the other options: editing cells, moving cells, replacing one type of cell with another type, etc.
• There are some size related costs that are harsh enough that growing that large is impossible without engaging in the mechanics to compensate for it with increased efficiency.

But in a criteria that does not involve special functions, I probably still prefer the “adjacency bonus goal” idea. (which also implicitly has some size requirements anyway)