First thing I will note is that I don’t think we should give too much weight to scaling things by organelle/part in the Microbe Stage. There are inconsistencies in size variety between different parts which aren’t realistic, largely caused by the sheer difficulty of having intense differences in scale between eukaryotes and prokaryotes. To accurately represent these differences would result in a big shake up (certain prokaryotes being too small to really see on screen, odd jumps in size when placing different parts that don’t correspond to hex count, etc.)
Second is that having a gradual transition results in alooooot of development time being spent on a very specific and probably short-lasting phase of the game for relatively little reward. The number of assets we’d need to have such a transition, as well as new game mechanics that are active only for that specific size, would take away a lot of work from the macroscopic stages. I’d assume such a period of being big enough to have larger structures, but small enough to see individual cells, would last maybe 5 to 10 generations.
I’d also have concerns on some limitations to what we can represent in gameplay at such scales. At that larger scale, cellular life can look abundant: how do we represent those hordes of individual cells swimming around and interacting with the environment? How can we allow for the introduction of certain autotrophic innovations, like those large macroscopic branching structures, while also allowing the player to do the same? How do we smoothly introduce terrain that isn’t spawning rocks, like in the Microbe Stage?
This isn’t something I’m necessarily adamant on denying, and having as smooth of a transition as possible is ideal. I was just under the impression that having such a transition would result in an extreme amount of work. So if we learn that such an endeavor wouldn’t be so bad, it could be something to investigate.