I wanted to create a thread on the forums since I notice balancing thoughts on Discord oftentimes get brought up, spur some conversation, and get forgotten. This is a thread for ideas which don’t require their own forums - an entire rework to the difficulty system for example should deserve a thread of its own. This is more meant to call discussion to a specific area, or store thoughts.
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Storage
To start, I wanted to discuss storage balancing. Currently, I personally almost never find the need to use a vacuole, and very rarely see players create organisms with a vacuole in it on the showcase section of Discord (I saw maybe 2 creatures with them skimming it).
I definitely don’t think that vacuoles have to be a standard for every single cell, but I do think this points to storage being an exceedingly abundant resource for organisms. There are rarely times where I think “man, I wish I had more storage”. And it shouldn’t be so that my organism is constantly starved of resources, but players should be forced to consider means of increasing storage capacities; it creates deeper and more intentional thought towards fleshing out your organism.
I want to try two things:
- Reduce storage amounts for all parts and see how that goes
- Reduce storage amounts for eukaryotic parts only since storage for prokaryotes is less approachable
I think a fundamental part of this issue is the fact that storage starts getting doubled as your organs split for reproduction, which I do honestly think is problematic for balancing purposes as a whole. It makes it so that you have to treat values as double, which can make balancing for a single part excessive, and balancing for two parts punishing during the players time as the organism they actually created.
That’s a more dedicated revamp though, so I will be trying to json some storage.