Player migration

[hhyyrylainen]

@FuJa0815

what if you can freely move around population in the editor like hhyyrylainen suggested AND you, as the player, can only go to paches already colonized. That way the player is not the first of its kind to visit the new patch.

@Buckly

Personally, I like the idea that the player plays a pioneering role in the game, such as how they and their species are the LUCA, and are likely to be the first to develop the nucleus, proceed into multicellular, etc.

I’m in favour of requiring the player to migrate first as well.

For the currently open PR (ie. the player moving to a new patch), I think this would be a good way:

• No population moves along with the player. This means that if the player doesn’t survive in the new patch they get kicked out of that patch immediately and I think we should have some penalty for that, so the death population penalty should be applied to the patch the player migrated from. Otherwise it would be free to try migrating all over to find a good place without a strategy. Though, I think we should make this configurable in the code so that if we add like an easy mode, it could remove the population penalty in this case.
• If the player manages to reproduce in the new patch, then that reproduction adds population for the player to the new patch.

@Buckly

With the player’s species inhabiting multiple patches while only the player makes meaningful changes to their population, I believe that we could allow autoevo to effect the population of the player’s species when the player is not present in that patch.

The plan is that auto-evo will affect with like 80% strength all player populations. There’s been an open issue about that for years. It’s one of those features that’s been planned forever but no one has programmed it.

@Buckly

I believe that 10% is a good place to start from. We can experimentally tweak it from there if needed. Though perhaps the number migrated could be controlled or effected in some manner?

As I said above, I’d prefer to not have this approach, at least initially for the migrate feature.