Currently, Sexual Reproduction has been implemented into the game as a reproduction mode (and in my opinion in a very true-to-life way). While it is mechanically however, as might be expected, compared to the non-sexual reproduction modes it is definitely just more difficult.
That’s why from the start there’s been consensus that having sexual reproduction selected should provide some additional benefit. An MP discount has been the most popular idea in the past, and while good, it lacks that immediate benefit that would let it evolve in real life (and auto-evo). As I proposed in a previous, more general thread:
This covers the “why sexual reproduction” scientific theories regarding increased genetic diversity, faster adaptation better weeding out of negative mutations and disease resistance (the latter I fold in with the previous benefit as “generally improved performance” since Thrive does not have diseases).
I still mostly agree with this, though I have to mention two things:
Increased environmental tolerance is actually not a major auto-evo benefit right now, though I have plans to change this in the future.
For the third point, it might be most impactful (and perhaps even easier to implement?) to hook this into the existing specialization mechanics.
So that would leave us with:
A significant but not extreme MP discount, of 20-30%.
A significant positive multiplier to environmental tolerances (the width of the bracket, where applicable).
I’ll try to implement this today, seems easy enough to make a discount if the player entered the editor through sexual reproduction as I’m already tracking this to know when not to spawn the sister cell upon exit.
Seems a bit hard to explain to the players where the effect comes from or if they are not adapted maybe they should change the reproduction mode, so I’m not really sure how to implement this one. This seems multiple times harder to do than the MP discount benefit.
To me this seems a bit more difficult to implement than you predict, but I’ll at least have a look to see if it is actually as hard to do as I’m sort of fearing.
Oh, I figured you could just check the species’ selected reproduction type upon entering the editor? But since you’re indeed already tracking that event for other reasons, I guess that’s not necessary.
(Although, one thing that comes to mind is the "go to editor console command meaning you don’t get the discount? Not a problem for normal gameplay, but a potential oddity)
In any case, for ensuring AI species get the MP discount (I believe for auto-evo they instead typically get extra MP), it would have to check for the species’ settings since they’re not actually going to “editor through sexual reproduction,” but I can handle the auto-evo side at a later date.
It’s less impactful than the other bonuses, so I would not consider it a priority.
But I figured the information on the reproduction method itself could indicate it, and have it show up on the tolerances along with the organelle effects.
I don’t think it’s that much of a problem to have a little bit of an advantage from “system knowledge” in that more experienced players will know to use Sexual Reproduction for tolerances, while new players need to encounter it first. That only becomes a problem when it is really required (see the new oxygen tolerance limits requiring organelles, before we updated the UI to sow those more clearly)
I was hoping it would be relatively easy since I don’t remember the adjacency effects being calculated in very many places, making it an easy insertion. But I will defer to you on how reasonable it actually is.
This would make the editor cheats be able to trigger the condition when it didn’t really happen.
I guess technically yeah I could check the reproduction type upon entering the editor, but the editor enter logic has a bunch of complications related to saving etc. so I thought I’d do this separately to avoid the almost inevitable bug that would happen when loading saves in the editor.
If you didn’t reproduce sexually, why would you get the bonus for it?
I totally forgot that part of the feature, and yeah it would be nice if someone else remembers to do that part.
Many places with adjacency effects doesn’t know for which species it is for, so all code leading up to that has to be modified to also pass the reproduction mode along so that it can ultimately be used in the calculation.
Presumably, if you’re using the console commands to skip through the game, it would be because you’re trying to mimic playing through the game normally, without actually spending the time to do so.
Console commands are not normal gameplay, so there is no gameplay argument here. If you are doing a test run and have selected sexual reproduction, then you expect to see the discount working in the editor, regardless of whether you played a full generation, or use the console to skip a generation.
No worries, I am pretty routinely around the auto-evo code at this point, so this should not be difficult to find for me.
In that case if you don’t think it is worth the effort at this time, I would not prioritise it. I might look at it myself at some point.
The edit command already behaves differently in this case because when you reproduce sexually the player is teleported to the gamete location where the merge happened and a sister cell is not spawned. If using the edit console command the return from the editor behaves as if the player was not using sexual reproduction (as there is no gamete to teleport to anyway) and thus keeps current player position and spawns a sister cell.