Metabolism & Playstyle Balancing #6320
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Increased size discrepancy needed to engulf something Slightly sped up the rate at which engulfed chunks are turned into compounds Slightly reduced amount of compounds retrieved from engulfed items Slightly debuffed amount of digestion time decrease from enzymes
Prior debuff returned to the issue where you would engulf things and would quickly go from gaining glucose to losing it. Slight increase for now, an additional 0.1 will revert back to original amount if it is still questionable
Some issues engulfing larger, but not huge prokaryotes as a eukaryote
Slightly bumped the bonus force a eukaryote receives so that players relying on some sort of mobility as a prokaryote don't immediately lose all that when they place the nucleus
* Reduced death penalty in both Easy and Normal to give more rope for experimentation and failure. * No free glucose cloud on normal difficulty, and top up to initial reproduction compounds. This ensures a standardized experience across all generations, which should more fairly test build fitness. * Bumped up AI mutation rate to 1.3. This is meant to be a temporary measure to proximately provide greater auto-evo diversity as auto-evo gets refined further.
Tweak Difficulty Presets
Keep committing different pull requests to this one and I'm not sure why. Undoing changes
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Writing a note to myself to check and make sure that hard difficulty isn't impossible because of the lower ATP generated, and to also bump cytoplasm storage potentially |
| "Name": "THERMOSYNTHESIS", | ||
| "Inputs": { | ||
| "temperature": 0.2 | ||
| "temperature": 0.4 |
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I think this nerfs thermosynthesis harder than I buffed it for 0.8.3... and in 0.8.2 all the feedback we got that it was way too hard to use effectively. So while I'm worried about the other major debuffs to ATP, this seems way too much.
The same applies to radiosynthesis which I did a similar 20% buff (but now this would give a 50% debuff so making it even harder than it was in 0.8.2).
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I can bump it down to 0.3. With an even higher ATP output, an interpretation of thermosynthesis I was going for is a powerful but unreliable source of energy.
I think there is a reason why we don't see this form of metabolism at all really with how theoretical it remains, and how unreliable heat gradients can be. Considering that, I think it's fair if thermosynthesis is seen as something players can make unique builds with, but not something that is very sustainable in the long-term. With balancing for these more exotic forms of metabolism, like radiosynthesis and thermosynthesis, a better balancing goal could be: accepting them as niche, but giving players looking for a different experience enough of an incentive to create unique playstyles. For radiosynthesis, that playstyle would revolve around dealing with the inherent fickleness of heat gradients for some powerful ATP bonuses.
I can still bump it down to 0.3 however - it was pretty hard to scale up.
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I commented on the community forums a but, but I'll put my thoughts here as well. In 0.8.2 nobody commented that thermosynthesis felt like a good gameplay style. For 0.8.3 I have not heard about anything yet from the players about how it feels. So maybe we should try to reach out? But my hunch is that the buff in 0.8.3 was approximately correct and we should not debuff the gameplay style at all before we can confirm how it is perceived now.
Ultimately I think that if thermosynthesis or radiosynthesis is too useless or too hard for the average player to use, we might as well delete them entirely as they don't provide any gameplay variety as they cannot be relied on as a gameplay style. Thus debuffing them actually majorly reduces the available gameplay variety.
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At this point, I feel pretty satisfied with balancing for iron. Consumption is paced to the point that player's don't easily fall into a death loop if they don't spawn near an iron chunk, but still requires the player to be mindful of iron's more vapid nature. This gives iron a more distinct gameplay style that was missing. What I'm going to investigate next is aerobic respiration and oxygen. Oxygen currently increases at a pretty slow pace, which I personally enjoy but could be too slow for the average player and could make the Microbe Stage too long. That would be beneficial currently regardless since it is our entire game at the moment, but it's still something to be mindful of. I'm more convinced that aerobic respiration needs a bump in efficiency because of how slowly oxygen builds now, so that's what I will nail down over this coming week. Currently, metabolosomes are pretty useless, and I'm not sure how mitochondria will perform. |
Interesting. I've seen like the opposite on the community Discord lately with many people commenting how it is normal to reach 60% oxygen and kind of complaining about the unrealistic nature of that. |
Oh, I meant a buff relative to the balancing as it is in this PR, not relative to how it is in the base game currently. Because I made both aerobic respiration weaker and oxygen much slower to build up, the effect is that even 20 generations or so in, metabolosomes generate like 2 ATP. I think around that time, they should start being at least as efficient as hydrogenase. With the new baseline oxygen and carbon dioxide start to settle it and how long it takes to reach that, getting closer to prior balancing numbers isn't as excessive as it was in an extremely oxygenated world. |
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I agree, that sounds way too slow in comparison. As microbe stage is planned to be at most around 20 generations in length, I think any last gameplay effects to kick in should at the latest be at generation 15... |
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I'm going to have another playtest session where my species doesn't evolve thylakoids/chloroplasts to validate, but I'm pretty satisfied where balancing currently is. In my playthrough, by turn 20, aerobic respiration became the most efficient form of ATP generation in the game. It's different than current game settings, where by turn 15, metabolosomes and mitochondria are absolute rockets - instead, by that time, aerobic respiration becomes a viable tool, and only continues to become more powerful as time goes on. Once again, I want to make sure that oxygen doesn't build catastrophically slow if the player doesn't choose to adapt photosynthesis. The result is a slower paced Thrive, where the two major halves of the Microbe Stage - an anaerobic and aerobic world - have more depth. And with changes to metabolism to make them more unique in playstyle, there is a bit more depth in my opinion. I think pace might be thought about more once more of the later stages are developed, but for our current game - entirely dependent on the Microbe Stage - this slower pace is pretty beneficial. This pull request isn't done yet: I still want to do some work on thermosynthesis, particularly exploring the output being glucose rather than ATP as Rathalos has suggested. But I do think this results in a more even experience. I will explore photosynthesis balancing next, but I want to focus on that in its own PR, as that might involve slight tweaks to the day and night cycle and a more comprehensive look at that metabolism. |
I also did this today:
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Wow, what a difference from my experience! I didn't think such a jump in oxygen content was still possible. My immediate impression is having this variety in experiences is beneficial - would you say your experience with these balancing numbers was generally positive? |
And I really have no clue what caused it! But I agree that a variety of different possible outcomes is a beneficial experience, as long as in either case you have enough of a variety of options to go forward.
Generally positive yes. And perhaps equally important: it does not feel like a downgrade in any way. Technically it's slowed down by at least a few turns, but it did not feel boring to play through to me. And at least in this case, once I reached the inflection point, there was a rapid change in how I should build my organism. I really want to see how this plays out in combination with the nucleus update and the auto-evo expansion I am looking at. |
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First impression on the Thermosynthesis change is very positive, I think this can really work! (If you're within the right size frame,) There is still the gameplay pressure of quickly moving for heating up --> cooling down --> heating up again, but that pressure is now the very visibly glucose bar in combination with the already existing temperature bar. I did notice two things:
Of course there's also the remaining stuff, like adding the glucose node to the miche tree for thermosynthesis, and probably adding CO2 to the process. |
The conversion factor of how much Temperature compound is given per unit of heating up can also be tweaked to make heating up give less "heat" for the bio process to work with.
This is the main reason why I didn't want to switch the thermosynthesis process to make glucose as this will break the symmetry of CO2 / Oxygen making balancing that then a whole mess again... |
This could also work (or be part of the solution in combination with the other factors). From a game design perspective, all I am looking for is not producing any glucose while cooling down, but producing enough glucose while heating up to cover the gap.
You mean a precise symmetry of consumption and production of CO2/O2, or just the rough balance where it is now? Because right now chemosynthesis seems to be consuming CO2 without producing O2? |
I don't think we have precise symmetry... so I think I meant the latter that adding anything that produces CO2 as a new thing will need a full rebalance of the Oxygen production system to ensure it isn't thrown entirely out of whack. And also the CO2 generation sources because if the consumption goes up with producers not going up the natural events that try to pump enough CO2 to the world might not be able to keep up and the vents could go to very low CO2 levels which would have a very major impact on overall game balance (especially as vents is the new player biome). |
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I've merged in the other changes except the thermosynthesis changes. I expect that will cause some merge conflicts to be reported but those hopefully should be quite simple as the changes on master will almost exactly match what's already here. |
Bumped up how much temperature input is needed to produce glucose, and I think it has produced benefits. For glycolysis - I am a bit hesitant to insert that, as I do think that because thermosynthesis is available basically immediately, it should be rather hard to lean into fully. Offering bonus ATP and glucose generation immediately could make thermosynthesis a no-brainer benefit as opposed to a playstyle with constraints you should commit to. If you do feel strongly that it does need a bit of an ATP generation buff however, I can add it in. |
Nice! I will try that out later.
Well, thylakoids and chemosynthesizing proteins both can convert their own product into ATP and are available immediately (depending on starting location) and the rusticyanin obviously avoids that problem entirely. That means they can exist as one hex. Only new thermosynthesis cannot, which I guess feels a bit weird. And I hope that by balancing the numbers, we can reach a point where your whole life as a thermosynthesiser is moving back and forth between a hot and cold spot to produce enough glucose to live. And if you actually want to get somewhere, plot a deliberate course between hot and cold spots to the target. I think that's not necessarily more "no-brainer" than adding a thylakoids, chemosynthesis or rusticyanin. Especially since thermosynthesis is extremely limited in the patches where it can work.
I will see how it feels with the new change. I do feel like adding glycolysis is overall a good idea, and if necessary the glucose production itself can be lowered a bit to compensate (so that you still need around the same number of hexes in total dedicated to glucose + ATP). |
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In my mind: with thylakoids, there atleast is the day-night constraint, and with chemosynthesizing, that is based more on the active pursuit of a cloud, so there's less of an issue in my eyes with ATP generation there. I also want to tackle some photosynthesis and chemosynthesizing balancing in their own PRs after we finalize thermosynthase balancing, so we can look more at the glucose generation there. With thermosynthesis, because there is much less of that constraint, I am more amendable to it not having glycolysis. Especially since with the new temperature input amount, players don't have to worry too much about the dance of going in and out of a hotspot; their temperature drops much more quickly, so the time before you can head into the hotspot and get even more glucose is really short. So having the build itself be more challenging to develop I think would be a good solution: it's autotrophic, sure, but you better makes sure you think your progression more thoroughly. |
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Tested the temperature consumption increase now, and I think it works very well! With glucose production stopping as soon as you leave the hot spot (or stay there too long), you can practically manage your movement looking just at the glucose bar. So I think this is fairly clear. However, it stops working when you get thermoplasts, because they consume less of the temperature compound while producing more than double the amount of glucose. I would just set that to 1.6 or even 2.0 now. Since we basically want all the "temperature compound" to be near-instantly consumed, I don't think we want the upgrade to go against that. By the way, I was able to quite handily swing a nucleus with this:
I guess I see the different gameplay of thermosynthesis as "different constraints" rather than "less constraints", but I can see what you mean. And I suppose I would rather use the glucose production amounts as balancing lever rather than break the quite fundamental rule of "every protein part has Glycolysis (except the ones producing ATP directly)" I also discovered an unrelated potential balance problem while testing: Other weirdness: Looking at the Json now: Metabolosome does 0.09 glucose into 30 ATP while mitochondrion does 0.10 into 70. That's a bit much of an efficiency gain, isn't it? |
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Added glycolysis to thermosynthase. Though I do prefer the prior version, this still performs well and is a step up from the current state, so it'll be solid regardless. If we get feedback that thermosynthase is too easy or something this next release cycle, we can look at removing glycolysis again. In regards to material/glucose input being lower for certain eukaryotic parts: I think about two years ago or so, a common complaint was that it was extremely easy to starve, especially as a eukaryote. There were also other complaints related to how inefficient predation was. So in order to create a greater feeling of progression when it comes to unlocking eukaryotic parts, I went with a general "more efficient output" balancing approach which didn't increase how much input was needed between enzymes/proteins and organelles, but still have organelles represent serious step ups. That way, eukaryotes are generally able to sustain higher rates of energy, but not have their food deplete very quickly. Considering our more recent discussions related to difficulty, that is something I'm willing to discuss and change, but I'd rather do so in a subsequent PR rather than this one. With ferroplasts in particular - I was thinking of a progression to iron respiration which slightly increased how long a player can travel without having to stop at a iron chunk. So that input change is a bit more dramatic. With hydrogenosomes vs. hydrogenase progression: my approach there was to represent how difficult it can be to scale up anaerobic respiration, even in more complex structures. I think it's more acceptable for hydrogenosomes to not scale up as well, considering it's either meant to be an intermediate or an intentionally low-energy lifestyle in lieu of aerobic respiration; though if players find it much too unrewarding, we can alter that balancing. |
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Tried it out again, I think this still works smoothly, and you especially need a lot more thermosynthases now. Minimum Eukaryotic cell for comparison:
Thanks for giving it a try. I do think this version works well and is consistent with the other parts. For what it's worth, I do think definitively separating ATP production from glucose production parts might also lead to more interesting cell design. But I think in that case we can look at cutting out secondary glycolysis across the board, not just for thermosynthesis.
Thanks for explaining this and the other parts. I think we can leave this and the other parts for after the next release and round of player feedback. I do suggest we pay extra attention to the hydrogenosome at that point, because right now I found myself wanting to not replace hydrogenases with hydrogenosomes.
As for the thermosynthesis, I think the current balance is good enough for the next release. We can also see how people feel about it at that point. So that just leaves the the auto-evo adjustment. Which I think should just be adding MinorGlucoseConversionEfficiencyPressure and maintainGlucose miches to the thermosynthesis chain in GenerateMiche.cs? |
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I noticed that this was not up to date with master and so showed quite many extra changes. I just updated this and this now shows only the thermosynthesis balance changes. It was hopefully the same as before, but someone quickly checking that nothing changed with that master merge would be good. I guess if you guys want to make thermosynthesis into a glucose producer I guess I'm fine with that change if we really want it. Though I would hazard a guess that either the wiki or the tooltips have to be reworded as they probably refer to thermosynthesis directly producing ATP and not glucose so there would be a massive disconnect between what happens in the game and what the text tells the player. |
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As a future reminder, I'll request changes here and note the need to update in-game text if thermosynthesis now produces glucose rather than ATP directly:
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Copying from the Discord: In the metabolism balancing PR, it seems that oxygen still goes through some wild swings and can still pretty easily reach 35%+ oxygen. So I'm going to lower the balancing again, to generally result in less final oxygen within the world. Though overall levels of oxygen would be reduced, since aerobic respiration is still so powerful, players should still be able to find it be a useful metabolism. And it is much easier to balance for those parts with a smaller range (usually 25% or so in highly oxygenated patches) than it is with a much bigger range (up to 40% in some worlds). |
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Also copying from Discord: Turns out that I forgot that the auto-evo tool doesn't perfectly replicate actual gameplay experience, which in this case means that oxygen builds much more rapidly in the tool than it does in a playthrough. So I undid that change. I think we should just live with this current interpretation, and if we still see feedback that oxygen is super-charged in most playthroughs, take further actions. I also did bump up metabolosomes a bit to make it more powerful earlier. Not a big change, just making it more viable |
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We are currently in feature freeze until the next release. |
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I think there's a problem... this now has the updated text, however it seems like all the other changes have been reset? It looks like this now has the text change but no change to the actual glucose production and instead it seems like you've taken some nucleus balancing changes from somewhere. I think that's not intended, because that seems like again a big change to do just a few days before a release.
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I think this was done with a separate PR? So this doesn't need to be open anymore. |
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Brief Description of What This PR Does
Tweaking balance across multiple areas that I think are relevant to the various playstyles and metabolisms in game, including the various anaerobic and aerobic respiration methods, pacing of how quickly the atmosphere changes, and predation.
Mitochondria and metabolosomes could arguably be bumped, but I do like the pacing of oxygen accumulation in the atmosphere currently. I also am not 100% how the densities work, so I'm going to investigate the .json file and might bump up density even more.
Overall, this should slightly incentivize forms of respiration other than just burning glucose while maintaining the power of aerobic respiration. Iron and photo-autotrophy remain powerful but face more constraints altering strategy, thermosynthesis is made powerful but slightly fickle, and radiation is slightly buffed. Reducing the impact of the nucleus on speed should also hopefully make it a bit easier for predation to occur.
Sulfur is notably omitted from this pull request. I want dligr's pull request on sulfur damage to be implemented before tweaking balancing significantly there.
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