Regarding the macroscopic single-celled organisms you mentioned as a comparison, I very much agree that these should be rationalized away as a very niche and dificult to represent/integrate aberration within evolutionary history. By comparison, simple macroscopic algae and small macroscopic blobs of undifferentiated cells like slime molds seem a bit less fringe to me. Also their implementation itself wouldn‘t be an issue in contrast to the single-celled macroscopics. Rather, forgoing them would be an unfortunate but bearable consequence of the envisioned progression which has to take precedence for gameplay reasons.
I never thought about it this way… This makes so much sense and alleviates prior concerns of mine I‘ve talked with you and others about in other threads. Maybe this abstracted/representative nature of the multicellular stage was obvious to all of you and it just went over my head?
Anyways, I fully support this! One question I‘d like to ask then is if this is at any point communicated to the player? Biology nerds could be frustrated by not understanding why their 20 cell organism can‘t rely on diffusion/doesn‘t work as an undifferentiated blob when that wouldn‘t be a problem at this size irl.