Just to add a few specifics on here:
Pressure and temperature tolerances are slightly better because there is an inherent cost: being adapted to one environment means not being adapted to another. But this is not the case for oxygen and UV tolerance, these are a simple MP cost for an unambiguous permanent improvement. The latter goes a bit against our design philosophy where most things are trade-offs and MP is the cost you pay to switch to a different payoff.
So some ongoing cost for oxygen and UV tolerance would be a good start here.
Part of this in my opinion is in our more general and auto-evo mechanics. The events typically move compound amounts up and down a bit. But all that does to the species in the patch is move their populations up and down a bit. Not exactly a cycle of extinction and diversification. (and that’s important, because Thrive is a game about evolution). The only auto-evo impacts compound amounts have are on chemoreceptors and nitrogen fixation. Completely removing compounds from an environment or adding new one in is what currently causes big shifts in what you actually see in the patch.
So the impact of events might also be increased a bit by having auto-evo be more responsive to compound amounts.
Similar to above, making sure compounds actually decline to 0 in specific patch types or making the amounts matter more will help differentiate.
From what I can tell, if species have their behaviour set to high aggression, and they can engulf, have pili or (especially) toxins, they are a proper menace. So I agree this is mainly an auto-evo thing. I think recent auto-evo changes have encouraged this a bit, so I am curious to see what the community response is.
One thing I do want to mention here is that dilution/upwelling/runoff happen so often that they feel less like “events” and more of a constant churn that does not really match having the a special event icon to begin with. They also seem to have more of an impact than the much rarer meteoroid impacts.
Particularly, the terrain chunks were specifically designed to be able to be rotated along the Y axis, rather than just the X axis (as is currently the case).
Beyond that, just some more interesting terrain arrangements rather than individual chunks would be fun.
Remaining comments:
- Bio-luminescent vacuole is still a bit in limbo. It still needs to be integrated into auto-evo, but for that to make sense (and for player usage to make sense), oxygen tolerance needs to have an ongoing cost. Otherwise there is no point to placing this cell part.
- I think the action part of the game could to with an infusion of “kinetic fun”. Simply put, things on the screen moving fast and bumping into/off of each other. With the compound “lines” bug fixed, I would very much like to push the currents even further.
- I think we could also set up a list for potential things artists can still work on if they want. For example, some upgrades have unique models, while others do not. One fun change would be if the toxin cell parts were made to match the colour of their selected toxin.