Beneficial effects of colonies and binding

[Buckly]

@Maxonovien

As long as you let the camera zoom be accessible to the spawn system, you can adapt to it, which would perhaps be even better than a fixed constant in any case. Although it could be a bit cheesy if you want things to spawn close.

An alternative is to base both the spawn radius and the camera zoom on the same metric, like effective speed or cell/colony size.

I suppose that’s fine as long as someone is willing to try coding it.

@Maxonovien

Well, extended resources storing is a pretty strong benefit as well, so you can survive much longer when compounds are sparse. This could especially be interesting for predators, as you risk less dying while chasing your pray (as long as the average net yield is positive… which I’m not sure of, given that I feel I spend more energy predating than other cells give me when playing this way).

Due to resource sharing, your effective storage capacity is already increased, next time you play Thrive pay close attention to your compounds bar when you are playing around with colonies.

@Maxonovien

I think a good way to think of it is to think of potential drawbacks of colonies (because we don’t want binding to be the ultimate strategy, do we?). And I think an interesting idea that was thrown on Discord is the compound intake dependent on exposed surface: in a colony, the total exposed surface is lower than all cell by itself, so it both decreases compounds intake and osmoregulation costs (basically an already present dilemma with the membranes). So, an interesting yet complicated way to do this is the gradient-based method, which means that cells in the center will have less intake, but less osmoregulation as well.

The problem with this downside is that right now cells equally distribute resources between themselves in a colony, at this scale, any delay before getting your share is negligible.

@Kasterisk

I’m not really sure how cell colonies move in real life but personally my idea for one of the benefit of a colony would be physical advantage, that is the colony’s physics in the environment. I would imagine a bunch of cells huddled and bonded together is much heavier with all their combined mass and with every cell also contributing thrust, a colony (given enough cells) could easily move big iron chunks and shove through small chunks and individual cells. Basically a colony has a higher impact.

I love this idea, nothing really to add to it. Cell colonies in real life move in many different ways depending on their arrangement. Try looking up volvox colonies and slime mold colonies, two vastly different locomotion methods.

@Kemikal

A string of cells as far as im aware is possible in the real world.Maybe not evolutionarily viable
but possible

Strand-shaped colonies is very much a common strategy in the microbial world, you’ll often see it in algae. More surface area for each cell to perform photosynthesis while still benefiting from the structural support and safety of a colony.

We could perhaps implement this in Thrive by using the A method, thus discouraging photosynthetic cells from forming large blobs and instead having just one or two connections to form a chain.