Multicellular Cell Count/Size Cost

Gameplay
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Remembering to post this before it slips my mind, as it was brought up in our Discord call. It’s a simple mechanic, so I will make this brief.

Mechanic: A new cost will be present in the Multicellular Stage.

  • Based on the number of cells in your organism, a cost is applied to every cell placed.
  • This cost will scale up the greater the number of cells in your organism.
  • For example, with spitballed numbers - an organism with 2 cells in it has a Cell-Count Cost of 4 applied to both cells. An organism with 10 cells in it has a cell count cost of 15 applied to all 15 cells.

Why?

  • We need some sort of limit when it comes to becoming bigger, so players can’t just spam the placement of additional cells. This will make players, at some points, focus inwards rather than on growing outwards, and will pace the Multicellular Stage.
  • Features like adjacency and specialization act as “bonuses” rather than crucial mechanics - absolutely fine for the Microbe Stage, but not completely desirable in the Multicellular Stage, where we want to introduce new editor dynamics. Having some sort of cost for the player to grapple with “pushes” these mechanics onto the player - increasing the “pull” effect we want with Multicellular mechanics.
  • It proximate real struggles that life contended with in becoming macroscopic. Size itself represented millions of years of evolution to get to a point where organisms could be macroscopic - in this stage, we would like to reflect that story in a way that is engaging to the player.

It should scale with difficulty if possible, unless other osmoregulation-related costs are good enough to cover this.

  • At Easy difficulty, this cost will be present and will limit rapid progression, but won’t necessarily make specialization and cell-adjacency absolutely determinant for success.
  • At Normal difficulty, adjacency and specialization become very important for properly balancing, especially towards the later part of the stage.
  • At Hard difficulty, adjacency and specialization are crucial from day one in the Multicellular Stage.

Questions Related to Auto-Evo

  • If needed, this mechanic can be softened for auto-evo. We don’t want to paralyze auto-evo, as it is important for there to be other multicellular organisms.
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Overall, I think this will work with the exact right implementation, but also with thinking carefully about how other new mechanics and the stage transition to Macroscopic are going to interact with this.

This would make auto-evo at least part of the time create species that can’t survive in-gameplay. Because auto-evo can reduce the number of ATP production organelles to what it needs, in order to be more efficient (need less resources to survive). If they then suddenly get hit with additional ATP costs in-gameplay…

Auto-evo should be able to handle the additional costs just fine as long as “large size + good specialization and design” still scores better than “small size + good specialization and design”.

In other words, there need to be clear benefits to the larger size that more than compensate for additional costs, assuming you are using the mechanics “correctly”. And those benefits should not be worth the size costs if you are not using specialization and adjacency correctly. I guess that’s what we’re going for?

It’s worth mentioning that the same should be true from the player perspective.

This is exponential scaling, so it’s going to reach a point where the penalty can’t be overcome, right? I guess that’s intended?

Also, related to:

The exponential scaling cost is something that we’re not going to have anymore in Macroscopic (or growing larger there would be pretty impossible?) So I guess the stage transition is supposed to be the evolutionary step that permanently resolves this issue? (This is also relevant to the requirements we set for the stage transition) We at least need to explain in some way to the player why they’re not dealing with exponentially increasing costs anymore.

When we’re looking at the actual real life issues related to the scale change, as far as I can tell there are:

  • SA:V, both for intake and output. (but this is not necessarily a problem for all multicellular shapes) This also seems like it becomes much more prominent for further upscaling past the size where our Macroscopic Stage starts.
  • Problems in coordinating behaviour and development (especially over larger distances).
  • Increased chances of individual cells going rogue an being leeches or cancerous.

So, since the first point falls away, I guess that leaves the cost you speak of as representing:

“The negative results of cells not always doing what they’re supposed to be doing and/or the energy the organism expends to make sure that does not happen.”

That makes sense to me as an explanation. How about you? The natural way to fight against this realistically would be better chemical signalling across the organism.

You didn’t make it explicit here, but when we are talking about the cost here, do you mean a direct ATP consumption, or something else? We also have the modifier available that we’re applying to cells for the specialization bonus, so another option would be to have the size and specialization effects directly counteract each other.

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Though scaling can be balanced for whatever is convenient, I think non-linear scaling is ideal just because it makes specialization and adjacency more important down the line. Whereas it can be ignored early on in the stage, allowing wiggle room for expansion, players should be incentivized to start really considering utilization of specialization and adjacency with more complex, larger organisms.

Balancing for adjacency/specialization should generally size-related costs if optimized correctly. Maybe the last 2 or 3 cells added could represent additional costs that are very hard to squeak out from adjacency and specialization, but overall, the flagship multicellular features should cover these costs if used well.

Atleast in my concept for the Macroscopic Editor, I have some writing on how scaling would be limited so that players can’t grow too huge too quickly (Section IV.II). Won’t get too into it on this post, but the gist of it the square cube law:

  • Basal Metabolic Rate is based in many ways on mass. Different parts of your body plan have a cost co-efficient, which is multiplied by the mass of your part.
  • Mass scales up/down by a cube of the scaling factor - how much larger or smaller you make your organism. As such, cost scales with an increased or decreased scaling factor.
  • A “circulation factor” exists based on the circulatory system of your organism, multiplying energy generation by a certain factor. This factor scales energy generation up or down with energy costs to keep your energy balance scaled properly.
  • Different circulatory systems/settings apply at different masses. Going beyond the appropriate “mass range” significantly hampers energy generation scaling, while going below the applied mass range means the cost of the circulatory system is excessive to any scaling benefit you could gain.

Surface area is also important, but I cover that a bit more in the document. So scaling/allometry should be important in the Macroscopic Stage, but imo, the Multicellular Stage represents the story of how individual cells developed the infrastructure needed to be able to scale up, while Macroscopic Stages focus somewhat on how the larger structures these cells make alter based on conditions, such as scale.

Yeah I think that’s very well said. I’ve often heard that one challenge multicellular organisms face is that they have to ensure numerous cells with numerous physiological traits - all needing their own preferred conditions for proper function - work as intended. Like you mention, there’s a lot of signaling and coordination that occurs to ensure that this happens, so I think it makes sense ontologically.

Yeah, I had a direct ATP cost in mind. I think that makes the most sense in how it is conveyed to the player, as well as the effect on player behavior and editor engagement. So for the below:

The cost for a 2-celled organism would be 4 ATP for each cell, while the cost for a 10-celled organism would be a cost of 15 ATP for all cells.

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It was pointed out on Discord that looking purely at the number of cells could incentivise making larger cells instead of many smaller cells, which isn’t necessarily what we want. (though the adjacency bonus will already be pulling somewhat in the other direction) Changing that would suggest either looking at overall size instead of number of cells, or having a penalty on cell size in addition to the cell number penalty. Both are significant complications though.

Right, I just wanted point out that those effects are quite different in nature to the exponential size cost mentioned in this thread:

This is a linear scaling with mass. (So, like Microbe Stage osmoregulation cost)

And this one suggests more so a slowing down of metabolism due to low SA/V, fixed by modifications that increase that exchange rate.

That’s just to say that by the current design, this Multicellular stage exponential size cost is implied to be a “solved problem” in the Macroscopic stage (Or at least, it has stopped scaling exponentially at that point and become part of the linearly scaling “base metabolism”), since you’re not really experiencing it anymore.

Or, as I just realized, we assume when scaling to macroscopic that the building of tissues as you’ve been doing in Multicellular, and associated adjacency bonuses, scales up just as hard, completely compensating for the penalty? (Though that would work for decreased productivity, not increased ATP consumption)

Alright, then I think we can agree to make this the “official natural explanation” behind this mechanic? That would be relevant for:

  • Any related flavor text.
  • The requirements for moving to the Macroscopic Stage (considering, as mentioned above, that that transition is implied to solve the problem)
  • The flavoring of any other mechanics/parts that are supposed to interact with this system. (which might have overlap with the above point)

Speaking of which, I think the appropriate cost for the increased signalling/regulation effort would indeed be:

While if we for some reason wanted to instead model the consequences of dis-regulation, overall reduction of cell effectiveness would make more sense.

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I think as long as we incentivize that player should engage with specialization/adjacency to counter-act this cost, cells increasing size could be okay as long as it isn’t just “bloat”, but rather an effort towards specialization.

In fact, balancing could be tuned to the point that there is also an incentive to trim down cells rather than an incentive to just add more. If specialization can be balanced so that it is extremely effective, and if (on non-easy) size costs begin to be rather large towards the end of the stage, just adding another part might not be enough - ensuring rather than your cell is specialized would be the most effective way. We’d have to be very attuned to balancing to make specialization not accidentally overpowered or costs too overwhelming (I think specialization being buffed by multicellular parts, like maybe with the signalling agents, could be helpful in pacing this).

I did bring up the idea of size-related costs when it comes to individual cells previously, as I argued it could limit bloat and the inclination to just keep adding no matter what. Though it would definitely be effective in that purpose, I think combining this with “cell-count costs” would be a lot for the player to deal with. I’d argue that the cell count cost is more congruent to the goals of the multicellular stage than size-related costs.

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