This sounds like this incorporates the recent idea on the community forums that cytoplasm should need to be a separate thing that is different from organelles. So I think / it seems like an incremental step towards this would be to make the game act like all organelles are always placed on cytoplasm. Like adding an organelle on top of cytoplasm would work like it does right now, but adding an organelle not on top of cytoplasm would have the extra cost impact of automatically adding the cytoplasm underneath it.
So what we could do as a first step:
- Make it so that deleting an organelle replaces it with cytoplasm
- Add extra cost to organelles when not placing fully on cytoplasm
- Adjust the cost so that the cytoplasm cost is subtracted from all organelle costs to keep the same balance as before
- Do all of those also for AI mutations
- We can later then rebalance the cytoplasm cost
- Tooltips and tutorials will also need changes to explain this to the player
That way we would make it so that growing bigger is a much more expensive thing than replacing existing organelles with something else.
What I suggested above would already be a very time consuming change to make, but I think it might be worth it to consider.
If we go for something that would be quite simple to do (like just a day or two to program it) we could make it so that the first copy of an organelle is much more expensive and subsequent ones are cheaper.