Woe is me for speed-reading, I’m sorry about that. Reading through the original post again I see that you’ve already gone over the importance of surface area and all that.
Fair enough.
Thinking on this more though, I feel it’s at risk of occupying the same niche as osmoregulation. It’s pretty much the exact same effect unless I am missing a key difference somewhere so correct me if I am wrong.
Instead, it might be more interesting to apply an efficiency factor to parts based on their exposure… More on that later in my reply.
I feel hexcount should impact osmoregulation since it flatly increases total volume, just maybe not so absolutely. But then again, surface area is unavoidably increased by hexcount no matter what you do so maybe it would be redundant?
You know what? Yeah. Let’s change things up a bit and use surface area proper.
I agree with density/surface area having a significant impact though, that’s a huge one and actually gives me an idea that I’ll elaborate on below.
A proposal of change.
I’m convinced now that part placement having more importance could go a long way in making for more engaging decision-making, so I’ll focus on that in particular. Factoring in surface area might be mechanically difficult, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that determining what is exposed and not could provide a great strategic layer to part placement.
We just need to be careful not to go overboard with it’s impact and depth as Thrive is already pretty mechanically broad. There’s alot for players to wrap their head around as is.
Surface Area is Osmoregulation Cost
As of now osmoregulation is simply increased by hexcount. This works well enough, but if we want to better emphasize part placement it may be more appealing to replace the hexcount variable in the original equation with Surface. Surface would be the total amount of exposed hexagonal faces present on an organism.
The initial hex of a player would have a Surface of 6, because they are a single hexagon which of course has 6 faces.
Throw a couple hexes on there, and suddenly you have a Surface of 14.
This cell shape looks great for speed, as you could easily center a flagellum for maximal speed output. However, it also has more overall exposure…
A more frugal player could adjust their hex positions like this, which would reduce their total Surface by 2, resulting in 12. This may not be very impactful at their current size, but it certainly adds up later on!
You might see that this position compromises their ability to place a flagellum in a centered position though, so they wouldn’t be quite as fast as the more linear build.
This is the basics of surface area based osmoregulation cost, and ideally would be about as complex as it gets outside of dealing with environmental conditions. It’s easy to grasp, hopefully very easy to explain in a tutorial, and even if a player is unoptimal they would still be able to survive just fine.
We could stop here, and already have more engaging placement strategy than before, but there’s more potential here.
Part Specific Placement Strategies:
So as we know, surface area is exposure. So what if some parts want to be exposed? What if others shouldn’t ever be exposed? Instead of total surface area having a blanket effect on the efficiency of all processes, exposure could effect certain parts in specific ways.
Photosynthesizing parts for example could have increased output based on per-part exposure, encouraging players to keep such parts on the outside instead of just wherever suits them.
This fellow here has opted to put their thylakoid in the center of their cell. It’s got a Surface value of 4, which is better than nothing.
Being more mindful of the mechanics at hand, this player decides to put their thylakoid on the end instead, thus leading to an exposure of 5. Not a huge difference, but it comes at no cost!
In a vacuum, this would obviously lead players to maximizing exposure of their photosynthesizing parts while being mindful of osmoregulation. But what if we added other parts that wanted exposure? Players would need to sacrifice the exposure of parts in favor of others. There’s plenty of possibilities!
I believe that an implementation as outlined above could significantly improve the impact of part placement without drastically changing how the game works. It’s easy to understand, it’s not too mechanically involved, and it leaves plenty of room for additional strategy without mandatory complexity.
In terms of impact, I feel that players should not be punished for an unoptimal organization of their cell, rather instead they be rewarded for good placement. parts won’t need to be exposed to function adequately, and the player will be able to survive just fine even if they need to eat a little more due to slightly higher osmoregulation.
I’ll need some help when it comes to the math though, haha.