Unlikely to be done as this would need to rework the entire microbe stage reproduction cycle. As with the 1.0.0 release it marked the completion of the microbe stage, so major reworks for it are not really in the cards anymore.
1 Like
I get that Deus mentioned adjacency, and that this would imply organelle adjacency. But I certainly did not have the impression from this thread that we decided cell part was a good idea, so I am not sure Deus really meant that. (I hope he can come around to confirm) What I proposed (and Deus agreed with) is simply “cells get scaling bonuses for what they specialise in.” Hex adjacency really did not come up in the conversation.
Personally, I would not be in favour of cell part adjacency. It seems like it adds a lot of not very interesting optimisation work on the player (and auto-evo), without achieving the objectives we set out for the design. (specialising cells, and multicellular tissues) It also does not fit real life phenomena from what I can see. Internal organelles of different types are usually quite distributed through the cell. So given that, it seems like a waste to spend developer time on it.
Yes, my proposal was on point 3, and Deus had ideas on point 2. Though my proposal on cell organelle specialisation is quite “gradual” and not so much focused on explicitly assigning a singular designation, though I think it could be modified to do so.
It’s a bit circular in reasoning, but perhaps the cell specialisation bonuses in cells could be amplified by the cell specialisation bonuses of adjacent cells?
Rough number example:
- Example cell 1 is 60% chloroplasts, so gets a 0.5x60%=30% boost to chloroplast process speed.
- Two adjacent cells also have the same ratio, so each give a 2/6x30%=10% boost-to-the-boost.
- There’s one adjacent cell that’s only 30% chloroplasts, so it gives 2/6x15%=5% boost-to-the-boost. Boost-to-the-boost total is 2.5+5+5=25%.
- End result? Cell A receives a 30%x1.25=37.5% boost to chloroplast process speed.
Numbers are obviously made up, bolded are the constants for balancing of the bonuses.
The math might not be immediately easy to understand, but I believe the end result is a very intuitive reward: the more you specialise cells, and the more you place those with the same specialisation together, the stronger they become.
This could make logical sense, if we’re talking about the cilia increasing passive collection of growth compounds? I don’t see a logical explanation if we’re talking about growth rate at unlimited growth compounds.
As an aside, I just tested that while writing, and with unlimited compounds an organism of 20 of the above cells takes almost 7 minutes to grow. What kind of number are we aiming for here?
If we do want to increase the maximum growth speed and/or the passive compound collection speed, I feel like it should be a bit more universal than a specific organelle. Limiting the growth time is in my opinion more a case of avoiding tedium than a question of challenge balance, and we don’t want some players to miss the option and end up frustrated with long generation times. (Cilia in nature are also just not a universal thing. And on multicellular organisms that have them, they usually don’t have them on all cells)
I am going to assume we don’t want to change the base values of growth and collection speed per cell because growth speed for Microbe Stage is where we want it (is this true?)
Simply multiplying growth and collection speed by the number of cells makes logical and biological sense: more cells growing and multiplying at the same time means more growth. But that kind of exponential growth would leave you for the longest time at 1 cell, and then progressively shorter times at each growth stage until the end. We could fudge that by just multiplying the growth speed by the number of cells the full adult has. That might feel more fun?
In any case, we will probably revisit the exact tuning if we add different reproduction types that don’t start you off with just one cell.
I like the ideas, but I have to differ to Hhyyrylainen on what is and is not feasible in the time we have. So in this case that’s probably a no.
I am partial to the idea of making players play through a generation of an unspecialised multicellular organism before they can start editing. That would make explicit the multicellularity through non-separation mechanic that the rest of the Multicellular Stage implies.
2 Likes
Got it, so this needs to be explicitly disabled for the microbe stage, because I still think that bonus adjacency calculation makes sense to implement in the base hex editor and thus microbe editor will “automatically” (with a bit of specific programming effort) get it.
Yes, that’s my reasoning exactly, because otherwise we just need to make it so that the passive compound gain just purely scales with your number of cells or something like that for example.
This doesn’t really need considering, because we no longer allow unlimited growth mode, that was the whole point of removing that option that we don’t need to consider it whatsoever.
I don’t think players who are growing slowly are actually full on compounds in multicellular, instead they probably don’t have anywhere near enough compounds to hit any compound usage limits.
I don’t quite understand this point…
Well my point kind of is that most players already ignore the cilia and then file complaints about slow rotation when they haven’t slapped cilia on all of their cells. So my reasoning with it being key for multicellular growth would force players to also have a reasonable rotation speed thanks to needing to use it.
But yes I also think that we need some kind of base growth rate scaling in multicellular. A simple test could be made just by multiplying the free growth compounds by the current cell count. Having to inspect all the cell types etc. to determine the wanted growth rate is going to be a lot more annoying to program.
I guess, but that would actually encourage making the bud and other early cells small and efficient. And also I think it is kind of realistic that as you double your surface area that the amount of filter feeding from the water you can do roughly doubles.
2 Likes
Ah, you mean implementing adjacency between cells in multicellular also enables adjacency between cell parts in microbe unless it is disabled?
Yeah, here I meant the “growth speed if you have unlimited compounds” still costing 7 minutes for 20 cells. If that time is fine, and if people are limited by phosphate and ammonia instead of growth speed usually anyways, then we need only look at the base compound collection speed.
Oh, this was just me thinking: as far as I know, the growth speed and passive compound collection in Multicelllular is currently just the same as in Microbe. So the speed could be increased by just changing those base numbers, but that would speed up Microbe as well. (which I am assuming we don’t want)
I see the problem you mean, we do need to do a better job at directing people at the cilia then.
Then again, is the problem “players don’t recognise that the annoyance they are having can be solved by placing a specific cell part” really fixed by placing the solution for another problem (That has even less of a UI indication. Turning speed is at least a number in the editor.) on that same specific cell part?
Or are players more likely to still miss the specific part and just post about being annoyed with both problems?
I hate to throw more popups at the problem, but my mind immediately jumps to players getting a message stating “Hey, your turning speed is low. Place more Cilia.” Akin to the environmental tolerance warnings.
Okay, then I agree multiplying the free growth compounds by the current cell number is a very reasonable first step.
1 Like
Basically yes as I’m going to write it as a component in the hex editor, and both the cell body plan editor and cell type editor (which is the microbe editor) both are derived from hex editor. So it goes automatically in both.
So basically the question is that do we want organelle adjacency bonuses in the microbe stage as it’s basically a free feature?
As an aside the reason why I would put it here is that I imagine that in the far off future the player would design space ships with a hex editor (like in Stellaris) and there we would again definitely want to have some adjacency effects, so that’s why the adjacency bonus system makes the most sense to me to put into the base hex editor code.
I don’t think anyone has found a way to move so fast in multicell that they could be full on phosphate and ammonia…
As far as I remember there’s just a static multiplier, something like 3x or 5x which you get to passive reproduction gain once you become multicellular. But then that’s it. It would be quite easy to make that multiplier increase by like 0.95 each time the player grows one more cell.
No, because multicellular species use a dedicated growing system, they do not use the microbe growing system anymore.
I was thinking that hopefully writing about the growth speed increase in the cilia tooltip and adding a dedicated growth speed stat that it increases would be enough to make the players interested as it would be the only part that shows that (and thus hopefully remember it when they need it). Though for that to work the stat would already need to be in microbe stage, but we could quite severely nerf the cilia growth effects in the microbe stage if it would be too powerful there.
1 Like
That makes sense, thanks for clarifying.
In this case I am currently leaning towards not using it for Microbe Stage/within cells.
From a biological perspective: internal organelles that exist in multiples are in my experience distributed quite evenly throughout the cell. I speculate that for example keeping mitochondria spread out keeps everything supplied with ATP more efficiently. Similar reasoning for things like chloroplasts and vacuoles.
Singular organelles like a cell mouth are usually in a specific location that serves their purpose. But there’s just one, so they are not exactly clustering. I guess you can see organelles associated with those singular parts often being close to them. For example, lysosomes around a cell mouth.
Another example I can think of is the Golgi being associated with the ER, which is associated with the Nucleus. But that’s all just one unified part in Thrive.
So to make it biologically reasonable, adjacency within cells should encourage keeping a mixed spread of organelles across the cell without clustering. For example, make sure every organelles is next to a mitochondrion. With exceptions for organelles clustering around a location because they need to do something at that specific location.
From a game design perspective, I am not sure that’s an interesting problem for the player to solve? Seems like for every given combination of organelles, there would just be a single optimal arrangement. And auto-evo might have to be adjusted to try to intentionally place organelles in the best location.
It seems like quite a lot of extra complexity to add into a place where players are already struggling with it?
So I am not immediately enthusiastic about it, but if others want it I am willing to look at what exactly the adjacency effects should be.
It’s worth a shot I suppose.
Something I had a limited success with before for the Microbe Stage is to have rotation speed affect auto-evo, making at least the organelle suggestion sometimes suggest the placement of Cilia.
It works sometimes, but unfortunately most of the time it still prioritises placing autotrophic parts on your predator.
1 Like
Weird feeling that for the first time ever a free programming feature is not wanted in Thrive…
I do agree but I also remember years of people talking about organelle adjacency bonuses off and on as a “fix” to the microbe editor not having enough strategic depth.
I mean this is true that auto-evo might have problems optimizing. But then this would truly be like an optional system that the most advanced players can enjoy purely to get an advantage and not something all players would need to know how to deal with.
Not that I’m extremely in favour of wanting this feature in. I can quite easily enough make it so that the cell type editor is excluded from the adjacency bonuses features.
1 Like
I will get around to responding to more parts of this thought train - but to clarify on the adjacency, the idea there was cell-to-cell adjacency, not internal organelle adjacency.
So cells of the same tissue type get adjacency effects from each other. Organelle concentration percentage, described by Rathalos, would amplify the strength of these adjacency effects. So if you have a “mucilage specialist” cell type, a cell with more mucilage as a percentage of total processes within the cell gets a stronger adjacency bonus from another “mucilage specialist” cell placed next to it.
That ties into the whole tissue layer formation incentive, and the conversation we had earlier debating whether or not bonuses to different or the same tissue types should be applied (we went with the latter to incentivize a process similar to tissue formation, on theory grounds ). I can clarify more over this weekend on muddy points.
2 Likes
I think either two ways:
- A flat cost that gets added per additional cell, starting in the Multicellular Stage
- Have size-related costs occur since the beginning of the Microbe Stage.
We definitely don’t want costs to suddenly be sprung on players, so having it either be something that starts adding up within the stage or have it be a universal thing would be ideal. I think it would benefit the microscopic stage gameplay as a whole, so imo, option 2 would be ideal. Plus, if we have the starting Multicellular Stage organism be multiple cells, that could be complicated to make compatible with option 1.
Commented this already in the above post, but this would be cell-to-cell adjacency, not part-to-part. If you would like more detail on this, I can expand - I think it’s somewhere above though.
That is a good question - I think Civilization could be a good reference for UI:
- Picture of the impacted compound/process with a % change next to it - green is good, red is bad (if we add negative effects, which I’m not sure if we will/should).
- Rigidity slider makes these numbers increase or decrease.
Yeah, any effect in this regard should only be applied as the Multicellular Stage goes on, or should be based on mechanics which are unchanged in going between the Microbe/Multicellular. So for size-related costs option 2, it would be a carry over from the Microbe Stage applied at a cellular level which doesn’t jump going from one stage to the next. Or for SA:V, it’s a largely negligible effect at first.
Though I will say that I think we should have atleast a bit of a push mechanic - especially if we go with the “you are supercharging a freaky organism” interpretation with balancing and such, having too much benefit can harm the minus side in the plus/minuses of strategy.
Huh, that is an interesting interpretation. One other interpretation I got was reproducing a certain number of times with some late-multicellular part, representing your organism getting ready for seriously upscaling. But this could work too.
Agreed here, except for the part-focused adjacency 
While I do agree to a certain extent, I do think that fully relying on auto-evo/AI to present a push can lead to some very inconsistent design. You’ve done some great work with auto-evo balancing so far, but it ultimately is an algorithm juggling a bunch of things at once - there will likely be a good number of playthroughs where the push isn’t fully there from other organisms. So having a push that is inherent to the editor forces the player to grapple with something. Challenging organisms would be a bonus.
Now, I do think that auto-evo in the Multicellular Stage should be really pushed towards making Multicellular organisms that are a threat to you. But again, and especially in a sandbox/editor game, the actual creation process of your organism should present itself with some puzzles.
So ultimately, I see the immediate mechanics to implement as a base are:
- As Rathalos says - specializing your cells more provides more of a bonus to that process.
- Adjacent cells of the same type receive a bonus to this effect, amplified by the extent of your specialization.
I also agree that speed and growth balancing are good immediate things to focus on.
Two points I have:
- Should there be some sort of debuff applied in combination with the adjacency buffing? Not fully sure on this, and we can introduce some sort of “debuff” to other mechanics, like SA:V.
- I think we should start a separate thread listing potential adjacency and specialization bonus effects.
They have one benefit we don’t, clicking a tile allows the bonuses overlay to stick thus allowing mousing over the effects to know what cause them. We don’t have that so while we can display the effects like that, the player would be totally unable to mouse over them as moving the mouse would switch the focused hex and thus reposition the effects. So that’s what I’m meaning that we’ll have a hard time explaining to the player where the bonuses come from (not just the hex but the actual source and information on what the player should do to increase the bonuses).
I feel like this is perhaps a bit too similar to the microbe stage advancing conditions.
1 Like
Hey, sometimes less actually is more.
I can get around to seeing what the adjacency effects could/should be if we were to implement them. Then we can see if it’s worth having as low priority.
If you initially disable it, would it be easily possible for “somebody with middling programming skills” to enable it and implement the conditions and effects, or is this something we really need to decide before work gets started on the adjacency system?
I do think costs related to cell size and costs related to “number of cells in organism” are two different things? Seems like we’re kind of treating them as the same thing here.
Though I guess physically speaking, costs related to number of cells, would realistically also be affected by the size of those cells. Talking about diffusion speeds for example.
So that would leave two different potential costs:
- cost for the size of one cell (right now there might not be a direct design purpose for this?)
- cost for total hex size of the organism/colony.
I think total hex size of the colony might be the way to go, since it can combine both size and number of cells. But it would have to be tuned low enough that even with small cells you naturally don’t want to reach Thrive’s practical performance limit on cells.
On having such a cost play nice in the transition between microbe and multicellular: the “total hex size” cost could indeed be present from the microbe stage already. Each individual hex would have a relatively minor effect, but adding whole cells would balloon the costs much faster. That’s how we can have the effect already there in Microbe stage, but become much more significant later on.
Another point that would unify the mechanics is to have the penalty also apply to colonies in the Microbe stage, but that would obviously require some UI element during gameplay to inform you of your current penalty. (Though this might also be necessary for the Multicellular stage, if the penalty is dynamic there as well)
As for the nature of the cost: I think it has been suggested before that getting larger could slow down all processes that require or produce an atmospheric compound? I think there is theoretical support for that from diffusion rates.
I guess at least for cell adjacency if the only effect we go for is “strengthening of the cell specialisation effect”, that would at least simplify what we have to show. There’s also going to be a finite number of different cell types, so those can be combined in the tooltip (as in “effects from adjacent storage cells: …”). So I wonder if we can fit everything we need to explain in a tooltip just for hovering over the cell in question.
Depends totally on the skill level, but this like like a thing that’ll take me like 15-30 minutes to do while implementing the system in general. But later if someone else tries it’ll likely take hours and hours and I’ll likely need to comment on such PR anyway how the adjacency bonus system is meant to be used.
Okay, but in effect what is different here than converting osmoregulation to be an exponential function?
To me this just seems like a double dip on the osmoregulation cost system…
1 Like
Alright, then I will see if I can come up with a concept for organelle adjacency effects before you get to working on the adjacency mechanic, so that we can decide at that point whether we think it’s worth having.
Fair point. I would say:
- Even exponential osmoregulation cost only applies and scales within single cells only. It would not scale up further to affect each cell based on the size of the whole colony/multicellular organism.
- It would be the same if it was just an ATP cost. It’s different if it affects something else. As mentioned before, it could slow down processes. (Though this is similar to some SA:V concepts?)
Though really I was just proposing how to limit problems with size-related costs, not on whether we should have them in the first place. I’m not clear on that myself.
But I think we do need to put in a hard cap on cells in Multicellular before the point of “game performance can’t handle this”. And it would be nice if there’s some natural limit before you get there.
True. But shouldn’t like scientifically being in a colony reduce the osmoregulation cost as your membrane has less exposed surface area?
Do we? People make 3000-organelle monsters in the freebuild mode, and some people’s computers can actually kind of play with that.
I don’t think we should arbitrarily limit the cell body plan size. Though if we make placing new cells much more expensive, it’ll be very unlikely that a player would get over 100 cells in any normal gameplay, and that amount should still work relatively okay on a slower computer (though other cells will spawn extremely rarely on lower entity limits in this case).
Exactly, osmoregulation cost should not get worse with larger size. But also scientifically speaking, there are other problems that come from getting larger. Mechanical stresses, but in particular also the increasing distance between “inside” and “outside” slowing down cells getting the compounds they need (or need to get rid of). In other words, why we have lungs, a circulatory system, etc.
This is definitely going to be a factor in Macroscopic and Aware, but I think Deus wanted to include it here as well. That’s exactly why it would be an effect separate to osmoregulation, and scaling at a different rate.
Fair enough, if there are no concerns from others here I have no objection to not caring about it.
That leaves us with size-related costs only having merit if they pose an interesting gameplay challenge.
This is considered the primary reason to have size-related costs?
Having superfluous cells/functions would already just consume unnecessary resources. If you don’t need them, they’re a waste, right? So do we specifically need size-related costs for this reason?
1 Like