I was focusing a bit on summarizing, reviewing, and presenting a unified concept for environmental conditions when I realized something.
It honestly is a bit difficult to conceptualize things for the microbe stage because of the very abstract nature of the patch map. We have a pretty good concept for how we will be dealing with the patch map in the macroscopic stages so I am not worried long-term. But in the short-term, it can be a bit awkward balancing environmental tolerances. For example, look at this patch map:
There are some pretty dramatic shifts in environmental conditions displayed here. If you started at the hydrothermal vent at the bottom-right and transitioned out of it, you would have two, maybe 3 patches to interact with due to your adaptation to pressure. Transitioning to the Mesopelagic patch (below the ice shelves) would give you one habitable patch since you aren’t adapted to the cold, and aren’t adapted to the high pressures which you escaped. And then transitioning to the cold (which is the patch from which you are able to access different clusters of patches here btw) would then limit you to one patch again. If you make it to the shallow sea patch in the middle, you will then have a few more options to spread to since surface patches are more uniform. However, for other patches, you are very limited.
This limitation isn’t in itself necessarily a bad thing (geographical/environmental barriers are very important aspects of species divergence) but it complicates things in terms of balancing environmental tolerances. Small shifts in your habitable ranges via organelles, such as we have conceptualized in the upgrade/modification concept, are useless if we have such dramatic shifts in temperature and pressure; the player would need huge and instant changes in environmental tolerances to move anywhere. It also means patch migration would have to be thought over since you’d essentially be forsaking your older population to death once you switch patch types.
We can dramatically increase the number of patches to include a better “gradient” of environmental conditions, but that could make auto-evo take a very long while (which to be fair is something we’ll want to deal with in the long-term). We can also eventually implement Buckly’s more elaborate patch map concept:
But I would like to preserve the mental health of our programmers after having just so recently found a satisfying short-term conclusion to our patch generation questions.
What do you guys think? Am I overthinking things? I guess we could theoretically just bump up the modification values for what we have conceptualized so far. But would that be the ideal gameplay experience?
EDIT: not quite sure why two photos aren’t being displayed on my screen. Is this the same for you guys?