Long term and (semi-)permanent consequences of Stages

[Rathalos]

@Deus

One thing I often think is that rather than focusing only on a “stage-to-stage” perspective, it makes a lot of sense to focus on a “phase-to-phase” perspective - where in this context, phase basically means gameplay character/perspective.

You’re very much correct on there being very clear phases in the game where the game design has a lot of overlap. But there is also discontinuity between the stages. And the reason I am hyperfocusing on the stages in this topic is because we made each Stage transition non-reversible, so that’s another reason why they’re a natural point for making permanent choices.

We also have our plans for pre-made starting point in later stages. And for example having a typical “animal” starting point and a “plant” starting point in the Multicellular stage would be odd if they can easily lead to the exact same point within two generations.

@Deus

• I think it would be really hard to make things like metabolism even a soft long-term impact because transitions to more “typical” forms of metabolism - non-lithotrophic heterotrophy in particular - is such an important thing.

Yes, this is one of the guesses that I was least sure of for that reason. But do note that it is soft for a reason here: you can still change it, it would just be more expensive. Similar to the soft-lock on membranes in the Microbe-Multicellular transition, the intention is: The human player can still do it to get out of the dead end, but AI species would likely not do it, because auto-evo says there are better things to spend MP on.

That would allow players to not get stuck, while still forming clear lineages in the evolutionary history, instead of a chaotic mess where everything blends together with 0 resemblance to how real evolution worked on earth. And I have to warn that the latter is a likely outcome if we’re not willing to make evolutionary choices “stick”.

Remaining thoughts:

• I was mainly thinking of this as not adding new metabolisms. Plants can and have ditched photosynthesis for full heterotrophy for example.
• All that’s needed for heterotrophy metabolically is converting glucose into ATP, so that only excludes iron oxidation and radiosynthesis.

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I also want to note that I also made this guess based on the realism perspective. If we look at earth’s history, because of the timescale difference between Microbe and Macroscopic, we just don’t see massive overhauls of cellular metabolism anymore with any frequency. No branches of macroscopic life suddenly develop thylakoids or chemosynthesising proteins in their cells.

The exception of course being through various types of symbiosis, like photosynthesis in lichen and corals, or chemosynthesis in vent tube worms. And that’s of course an exception I would want to maintain.

@Deus

Hh also mentions that he will at first make metabolic sources like iron, sulfur, radioactivity, etc. pretty big dead ends for a long while. We also just, in many ways, do not have much reference for what that looks like - we can probably generally deduce that very simple organisms which have these metabolisms focus on surface are for a while, but what after then?

Yes, and I think we mostly have the answer for that, similar to how we know it for sentient obligate phototrophs and non-terrestrial technological civilisation: it’s a scenario that isn’t actually realistically possible on an earth-adjacent world, so we can’t actually let the player do it, but we also need to warn them and give them the opportunity to get off that track.

We’re pretty inevitably going to end up in dead ends because of the number of metabolisms we decided to model in Microbe, so I think we need to start designing these kinds of escape mechanisms instead of designing to make everything viable long-term. Because we’re barrelling right towards the point where the latter would visibly clash with basic scientific accuracy.

@Deus

So what that would mean is that 4 membrane types are basically no-goes in the Multicellular Stage, especially if we make it more difficult for Multicellular membranes to be changed.

As I said in the Multicellular Parts thread, I think we can actually make 4 out of 6 membrane types fully motile-capable in a scientifically plausible way (that’s actually also interesting from a gameplay perspective!). So I will answer the rest of this point as if we’re talking about just the remaining 2.

(And those 2 remaining, while accurately would be inflexible, could still be motile through ciliary motion and mucus gliding, though that would probably not be reasonable beyond small Macroscopic species. So, granted, that would only move the problem.)

@Deus

• I also have some hesitancy about making membranes particularly strict, just because we will likely have a similar issue of having sessile gameplay be largely neglected for a while until motile gameplay is pretty well fleshed out. … As then you’ll be an absolute dead-end for a long portion of development time - which in Thrive terms can be a decent portion of a decade - in the Macroscopic Stage.

As I said above, I think the healthier approach here is to accept there are evolutionary dead-ends and develop escapes for them, rather then trying to drag every possible option straight through to the society stages while fully breaking away from scientific accuracy and similarity to real evolution.

And I think we should look at “sessile macroscopic is not super developed right now” the same way we look at “Macroscopic stage is not very developed right now”, i.e. we just nudge people away from it towards the areas that are more developed. Also again worth noting that you can currently play sessile Multicellular, which isn’t particularly engaging, and yet we don’t make any particular adjustments for it either. We can handle sessile Macroscopic life the same, because it is entirely player choice to go there.

@Deus

In the macroscopic editor concept, I deal with this by assuming that all motile macroscopic organisms start with the same, mucaceous “base” skin type, and using the “skin attribute” system, allowing the initial unlocking of certain attributes based on your membrane type in the Multicellular. Though this is more easy to integrate and cohesive for the player, it isn’t without flaws - this cheapens the impact of membrane choices in the Microbe/Multicellular Stage if differences between these attributes aren’t strong.

This is indeed the thing I fear would be very likely. Especially if it’s just “initial unlocking of certain attributes” instead of something fundamental that can’t be changed. Because you’re taking something that would be the same as what makes plants, fungi and animals permanently and fundamentally different, and turn it into something that’s a temporary speedbump. That’s not just an accuracy question, I think that’s just shooting ourselves in the foot in gameplay variety and interesting world variety.

(And, as I have mentioned elsewhere, turning cell membrane characteristics into just skin

@Deus

I think the Microscopic/Macroscopic transition will be the most difficult transition for us to deal with in Thrive just because there is such a huge perspective shift. With the Biological/Societal transition, elements like the world and your organism atleast serve as a baseline - here, the entire world changes, the time shifts forward, and your organism is inherently different.

If we complete the current version of the roadmap, I think the change in the organism itself doesn’t need to be as fundamental as you might be imagining. I think things can be quite accurately translated. But certainly the perspective and world change makes it tricky.

@Deus

• For “basal body shape locked-in”, I think a big aspect of that will essentially be your choice of a skeletal structure. I focused a lot on the difference between a hydrostatic, exoskeletal, and endoskeletal system.

I’ve said it elsewhere, but I do think this functions very well as a soft lock-in mechanism.