Patch Dynamic Environment

[hhyyrylainen]

@Deus

Which would result in what is essentially a fireball Earth in real life. There have also been instances of certain important compounds being completely absent in patches, such as 0% carbon dioxide, making photosynthesis impossible. We can get away with some intense ecosystems since a lot of the Microbe Stage takes place on a planet with incomplete biogeochemical processes, but all-in-all, we should introduce some control on compound frequency - for both balancing and realism purposes.

I think all of these cases have been with the experimental compound production enabled. So it is clear that the volcanism (as a base co2 generation) I added for the normal photosynthesis compounds production, is working relatively well.

And we seriously need a big warning text under the checkbox to tell players to not enable experimental features unless they are really sure. And if they enable it they must disclose that whenever they are reporting bugs or balance issues.

@Deus

for example, +2% carbon dioxide every turn - to represent geological processes and other important systems occurring in the background.

Exactly how it is in the default version.

At this point I think we have to discard all feedback about the experimental compound production, because it just is so unbalanced and non-working that it’s not worth it to try to figure out every single thing wrong with it.

@Deus

Along those same lines, might it be useful to have compounds be subtracted against once compounds reach a certain threshold, to represent geological recycling and chemical processes that naturally balance out excesses? For example, if we decide that, say, 30% oxygen is too high for a patch, 1% of additional oxygen will get removed automatically each generation alongside any biological activity for as long as the oxygen amount is higher than 30%. This will allow us to enforce soft caps as well. This can also tie into planet customization as well, and if we wish, can tie into a bit more advanced of a compound simulation - if iron is higher than 5%, then the “cap” for oxygen is lower, and the automatic reduction happens much earlier (that could be complicated to track if we make iron get eaten up by oxygen as well).

On the roadmap there’s an item to stop representing the gases as percentages, which will help a lot. Though a relative soft cap might be necessary, but we don’t fully know before trying.

One idea I think I might try to do soon (as the above item isn’t fully about this, but more like displaying stuff as ppm format so that the players aren’t fooled into trying to sum up the things, which basically everyone does when given percentages as everyone is too familiar with those) is to switch up how the calculations are done.

Basically the idea is to calculate the volume for each patch, then multiply the volume by the percentages to get absolute values. Then the change calculations are done in absolute values before converting to percentages back. This ensures that the percentages can never go above 100.