For a while now, there seems to be a player consensus that heterotrophy, or predation specifically, is by far the most difficult and unreliable lifestyle in the game. While to some degree predation being less reliable is true-to-life, I don’t think we really want to see such a big disparity between lifestyles (I think differences in difficulty should primarily come from the actual difficulty settings). One specific point is consistency, because it does seem like sometimes you hit a good stride as a predator and get more compounds than you could ever use.
Recently, there has been a change making the amount of compounds dropped in chunks more consistent. I want to go a bit further in making the glucose gained more reliable.
Currently the resources you can gain from another cell, whether through engulfment or chunks and clouds dropped on death (from what I can tell, the latter case gets an initial 10% reduction), are based on:
- All compounds they have in storage.
- 90% of the reproduction costs of each organelle (phosphate and ammonia)
- 125% of the glucose storage capacity
The first, I believe, makes plenty of sense to keep variable. A phototroph that has enough glucose production and storage to not worry about it should be juicy prey.
But the third has some funny effects. Most organelles don’t provide a lot of storage, prokaryote metabolic proteins for example give 0.25. So the amount of glucose you get from this out of 4 metabolosomes would be 1.25, which is not nothing, but also not that much for a predator that can hunt prey of that size. With 4 Cytoplasm that becomes 2.5 instead, which is a big increase for a species that is probably less effective!
But it gets particularly relevant when you consider auto-evo recently learned how to place vacuoles, and is sometimes very enthusiastic with it. 4 Vacuoles provide 25 glucose! …As long as the dying cell has at least one organelle that uses glucose, otherwise it’s 0.
So, the game is using a cell statistic to provide a guaranteed amount of glucose, but is perhaps not using the best option.
Scientific Intermezzo
All life, whether it produces glucose from photosynthesis or not, whether it consumes glucose for energy or not, is made up of organic molecules. That includes Thrive life, since we assume carbon-based life. Those molecules include carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, modifications of all of those, etc. Even though a lot of them are not used for energy storage at all (instead being structural and functional), all of them can and are consumed for energy, especially by predators. If you go and eat an animal that has 0 stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, you can still get energy purely from the proteins in for example its muscles, and the lipids that make up its cell membranes.
Because of simplifications in Thrive’s system, we combine all production and consumption of organic molecules as “glucose”. Therefore, it is entirely reasonable in Thrive to get some amount of glucose out of any cell based on its size, regardless of how much actual glucose it has stored, or even if it’s a iron eater that never stores any glucose.
Proposal
I want to reduce or remove the “bonus glucose based on storage capacity” mechanic and replace it with the addition of glucose based on applying a multiplier to the total reproduction cost (phosphate plus ammonia). As an example, that means one cytoplasm, metabolosome or vacuole each provide 2 glucose (or 1, or 4, etc.).
That gives us a consistent number based on the reproduction cost of the prey (which is much closer to just being their size), which with the multiplier can then be easily tweaked up or down. It would no longer be dependent on the quite specific storage capacity, which can fluctuate a lot between cells without it really being obvious that this would produce more glucose.
Another thing I’m looking at is that the base digestion efficiency of a cell is 50%, with the maximum being at 60%, and each lysosome adding 7.5% (without considering specialization). I do believe that is perhaps a bit too narrow, and too little advantage for placing more than one lysosome. So I am looking at some combination of the options:
- Reduce the minimum digestion efficiency. (this runs the risk of making prokaryotic predators not worth it)
- Increase the maximum digestion efficiency, perhaps to 70% or 80%.
- Decrease the bonus per lysosome (risks making lysosomes not worth it).
- Decrease digestion speed to make the other function of lysosomes more worthwhile.
Any thoughts?