Beginning Concepts on The Multicellular Stage

[Rathalos]

@Deus

Cell Specialization

• Size-Related Costs - After a certain size, non-linear costs begin to apply. This pushes players away from hoarding too many functions.
• Adjacency Bonuses Scaling Up With Proportion of Parts in Cell - Adjacency bonuses get stronger the more of a specific part is in your organism, pulling players towards engaging with specialization.

@hhyyrylainen

How would this actually work? What if the player already is so big that they get immediately wrecked once they go multicellular?

I think it would make more sense to have a buff / synergy system for cells that do less each process would get like an efficiency and speed bonus or something.

I’m not sure why Deus did not explicitly mention it here (I previously thought he did), but the latter was indeed the point of the system I proposed before. (not sure if you’ve seen it). It’s not really about “adjacency” at all, just about giving scaling bonuses for having cells specialised in something.

I guess it got mixed up with cell-to-cell adjacency to also support making tissues?

(individual cell) Size related costs might not be truly necessary, but if we have them, they should also apply to single-celled organisms.

@hhyyrylainen

So we want adjacency bonuses for organelles? And that would also apply to the microbe stage? (as it would be quite a pain to separate out the bonus to only apply in multicellular).

So, given my previous statement, the plan here was not for adjacency, but a simple bonus that looks at what % of a cells hexes are one organelle and giving that organelle a scaling bonus based on that %.

Personally, I was in favour of also applying it to single-celled organisms, possibly scaling up in impact with the nucleus, and binding agents/multicellularity. This both gives an incentive for more specialised microbes, while then letting you use cell specialisation in the Multicellular Stage to partially “break the rules”, adding a new dimension to what you were doing before.

@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?

Yes, I am working on the specifics, but I think it would be to have some specific features. For example, looking at reality, having a cell type specialised to producing offspring. Having a certain number of cell of different types and a required adjacency bonus also makes sense to me.

A kind of “minimum complexity”, I suppose.

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@Deus

But I think we do need to make sure that players have some sort of a reason to engage in these pull mechanics. Since a lot of these are pull mechanics, they would naturally be expressed as bonuses to energy production and metabolisms. As such, we should make sure we have something pushing the player towards working with our pulls. Otherwise, players will just go “eh I know these mechanics exist but I’m just going to do the same thing I’ve been doing in the Microbe Stage”.

As for push factors in general:

I think the most important thing is what it should be in all of Thrive: If you don’t take advantage of the mechanics, others still will and they should be able to outcompete you as a result.

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@hhyyrylainen

In terms of the first features I suppose that hex placement adjacency bonuses, both for organelles and cell types as a whole (and maybe this needs the cell specialization bonus to be done as well to know what cell types want to be next to each other) could be a good first set of features to do as it’ll upgrade the body plan editor to have more significant effects.

Also probably movement speed / growth speed for colonies need to be adjusted as an absolute first priority to make the stage not a slog.

I think I agree with these priorities. Though you seem to be talking about hex placement adjacency as a separate thing, and then mention cell specialisation separately? I guess I am a bit confused if we’re talking about the same things at this point.

So I would propose in order:

1. Adjust movement/growth speed in Multicellular Stage.
2. Cell specialisation bonus.
3. Cell adjacency bonus.

That would first remove the barriers to Multicellular. And then I think with points 2 and 3 we have the “core evolution loop” of Multicellular working. I think that’s a good base to then see how to expand it (and how much we can actually afford to do in our timeframe).

@Shinhosz

Each organization could give different buffs regarding energy required to increase the colony, also these are present in plants, fungi, animals and others.

I actually looked into some of this when I started creating a theoretical background for the Macroscopic Stage. My conclusion is that we can’t really represent a lot of these organisations well in our mechanics. Do you have any proposals for how this would work, for example when you would decide between them, or how they could be displayed?