General Balancing Thread

Gameplay
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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:

  1. Reduce storage amounts for all parts and see how that goes
  2. 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.

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Any luck with this? Obviously I could made that branch for you if you need me to, but it sounded like you got this.

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Thanks for the check in! No need for the branch, but if this is something you personally want to see addressed soon and I’m being slow, I won’t be upset if you go for it. I’m going to try to attempt some balancing either this week or the next.

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I am going to try tinkering two different things soon:

Lifespan/Growth Rate - The community has previously given feedback of there being dull moments in gameplay which, generally, revolves around waiting too long for a reproductive cycle that is clearly successful. In other words, they consume enough phosphate/ammonia and resources to be sure of successfully reproducing, so it takes maybe 30 extra seconds of lingering around before entering the editor.

This isn’t that much of an issue in the later parts of the Microbe Stage since by then, some sort of competition tends to arrive and there are abilities to interact with. As simple prokaryotes however, where the environment can be empty and cell functions are pretty bare, this can be an issue.

As such, I will try to to reduce the starting reproductive time (how long it takes for LUCA to reproduce). If further steps are needed, I might also tweak the amount of ammonia and phosphate additional parts if reproduction time increases too slowly or rapidly.

Engulfment Rebalance - Currently, engulfment is really, really powerful. This is much better than how it was before, where predation was so unrewarding that you could barely fill up on energy from consumed cells. But an opposite problem is now present, where basically every organism the player sees can easily be consumed if the player bumps into them, and bumping into a crowd basically means a free trip to the editor.

Predation being rewarding isn’t the problem; I think it’s more how easy it is to transition to relying on heterotrophy. In my prior playtesting with Thrive, I’ve found that I inevitably started consuming organisms, even if I generally didn’t have that playstyle in mind. And, again, I found that just chasing organisms around turned out to be the quickest and most reliable way to get to the editor, despite my organism not being very finetuned towards adaptation. Ideally, it should take some design choices and specialization to become a predator, but, once adapted to it, predation should be rewarding.

Here are some balancing changes I am weighing for this balancing question…

a. Reducing Engulfment Storage - Currently, engulfment storage can be insane, allowing relatively innocent-looking player creations to voraciously devour an entire horde of cells for supper. Ideally, we should balance that in a way so that unadapted cells can consume maybe one small-enough organism, but require more adaptations and the placement of lysosomes to consume multiple small organisms or medium/larger organisms as well.
b. Adjusting Size-Discrepancy Needed for Engulfment - The size discrepancy between cells doesn’t need to be that different for engulfment to be successful. This could be looked at, but I am going to look at engulfment storage first before tackling this. The two in combination could be very restrictive and difficult to overcome. It could also complicate other aspects of the game, such as endosymbiosis.
c. Adjusting Digestion Speed/Efficiency Stats - I am not 100% familiar with how the lysosomes work exactly, but through personal experience and reading the developer wiki, I assume they tweak digestion speed and efficiency. Having baseline stats for each be lowered could incentivize players who want to become predators to invest in lysosomes more.

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I think this is the wrong thing to do because there’s been no feedback lately that the early game is too slow to reproduce in. The only part of the game that has gotten that feedback recently is about trying to get to 20 colony members.

Additionally I think the early game cannot be faster because new players would be overwhelmed if they need to play it any faster. So I wouldn’t make at least the first 3-4 generations any faster than currently. I think it is plenty fast to get through the first few generations.

This could be true, and the info I’ve seen could be biased towards the people who want to chat with us, but from what I’ve seen is that everyone complaints about the AI being able to counter their engulfing with spikes. So I think that unless very carefully designed any change to make engulfing harder will just make it unrewarding again.

I was actually thinking recently that we would need some engulfment buffing for multicellular colonies as it is a pretty common thing to create a bug report when your colony lead cell is full on engulfed stuff but other cells are empty. For example if it was realistic we could add some kind of multicellular exclusive organelle for transferring ingested matter between cells. Anyway that isn’t related to what you said but I just wanted to share that.

I think this is a probably doable idea, but will require quite many changes everywhere to change how engulfing storage is calculated and how the check for what you can engulf works.

Technically this is much, much easier to change as it is just a single constant variable that needs tweaking. Though I guess there will be some in-game text that will be outdated with this change.

I think it would actually benefit at least the realism of endosymbiosis. I saw one screenshot where someone was big enough as a bacteria to endosymbiosise an eukaryote…

The baseline gain from engulfment has been buffed multiple times over the past few years. So if it is nerfed back to what it was, then all that tweaking was pointless and we are back to engulfing feeling “useless.”

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Some of the feedback I’ve seen is that the beginning of the game can feel somewhat slow. I don’t think any significant shortening is required, but even a roughly 10-15 second shortening can lead to much better balancing down the line. Regardless though, I’ll try both shortening the base time to reproduce and reducing the increase to reproduction time gained by placing additional parts exclusive of each other and see what feels right.

Huh, not sure if this is possible, but it is important to consider similar tweaks making it easier for cells to share material for predation to be worthwhile. I think I’ve heard it’s possible for simple multicellular organisms to break down whatever is digested and split those smaller components across different cells, but I could just be making this up to be fair.

Regarding the burdensome changes needed to engulfment; I think it is important, but it might be best to delay such a change to 0.9 and try other means first.

Fair

Were the tweaks an increase of the maximum amount of compounds given by an engulfed cell, or was that amount constant throughout these tweaks, but efficiency/speed of digestion was tweaked? I was assuming that engulfment was fixed by increasing the amount of phosphate and ammonia they could give.

Considering how rewarding predation currently is, I think it is fine if we require some specialization or part placement to fully take advantage of it. If the reward for adapting is good, then I think an additional burden to get to that point is fine; the satisfaction of configuring your organism to take advantage of that niche could be a nice feeling for players.

Regardless, that could be something to consider after adjusting the size discrepancy between the engulfer and engulfed, and adjusting storage.

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Actually, I think only glucose has really been buffed. There’s a special function in the game that creates glucose out of thin air when you engulf something to make it more beneficial to engulf. And I think I remember the digestion efficiency base multipliers being increased to make engulfing more efficient. I think digestion speed hasn’t been changed (much), because that would nerf engulfing when you get less time with getting the resources.

I see a potential problem where if early engulfing is not rewarding, new players will try it and determine it to be a bad strategy and never commit to it to get the real benefits. I think quite a big potential pitfall in discussing changing the balancing of early game based on our experience and the fans who talk to us, is that the average new player’s experience is probably totally different. Reading recent Steam reviews I think we get more people complaining that they cannot understand the game than people complain that there isn’t enough depth or that the early game is too easy. So I think we are just about at a state where the early game cannot be made harder. And that there’s only marginal benefit to making the later microbe stage harder or more in-depth. Though that’s just my interpretation of the data.

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I hardly ever use lysosomes with amylase (the default enzyme). I don’t really see the extra resources gained from digestion as being worth the extra cost for adding the part - though of course it’s better than just adding an extra hex of cytoplasm.

I use lysosomes with chitinase or cellulase when I keep trying to engulf cells with chitin or cellulose. Recently, though, I’ve found that I rarely need either, as a large proportion of cells I encounter are only recently split from my species.