With @Rathalos’s auto-evo improvements really improving how varied and competitive organisms are, I think the lack of counters against toxins is becoming more obviously a deficiency.
If a significant percentage of organisms in your world evolve toxins, options become much more limited. Two facets of the game are particularly affected:
- Predation - A significant number of organisms become inedible. Predation itself is seen as unrewarding as is by some players, so this is particularly devastating to heterotrophy as a strategy.
- Constant Danger From Even the Tiniest of Threats - Because there is no counter, even a really small nuisance - like encountering a single, tiny prokaryote, as a giant eukaryote, with toxins - would be an immense struggle. If you encounter a swarm, forget it.
It’s a good thing to have harms that cannot fully be avoided in playthroughs - that creates a threat that the player will always have to be mindful of. However, a major component of a well-designed threat is the opportunity to counter a threat. If a player is facing an active harm that can never be fully mitigated, that’s seen less as a threat, and more as unfair.
A lock of immunity doesn’t just effect the Microbe Stage: this can easily spiral out of control in the Multicellular Stage. Multicellular organisms are larger, slower, and generally less maneuverable - so it is even harder for them to avoid toxins, and even easier for them to fall prey to toxicity. If a player constantly has to restart progress to a threat that they feel no escape from, that can very easily lead to a frustrating situation.
We want to make sure that toxins remain potent, but there’s a way to ensure that any counter isn’t too expansive:
- Immunity Only Targets One Toxin Type - players have to choose which agent has damage nullified (except for membranes, which have their own balancing to consider).
- Immunity Is Not Comprehensive - players can never fully nullify a toxin; just debuff it to the point that it can be digested, or can be managed to the point that a player has enough time to react.
- Immunity is Iterative - You can’t go from vulnerable to robust in a single generation. Building immunity would take multiple generations.
- Immunity is Expensive - You can’t just spam immunity parts willy-nilly; they take a massive ATP drain, and thus, must be managed strategically.
A potential solution?
- Immunity part/upgrade, perhaps to lysosomes, but if not, a seperate part themselves.
- A single immunity part costs 7 ATP to maintain, and costs 55 MP to obtain.
- A single immunity part nullifies damage/effects from a particular toxin by 15%.
As such; it would take 3 generations, and 21 ATP at the least, to nullify the effects of a toxin by 45%. Which I think is a fair process. This would still make toxic organisms a threat and not easy to digest, but would atleast make them edible. And would make hostile toxic organisms remain a threat that must be neutralized, but not necessarily a death sentence - unless you bump into an overwhelming number of them.
We would need to make sure that auto-evo is atleast somewhat cognizant of immunity, so that it doesn’t just universally focus on one agent type. I think current playthroughs already can display a decent variety of agents.