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Post by Atrox on Dec 12, 2015 16:32:58 GMT
After all, if the infants die easily, how can your species continue its existence? Mass production, make more! Well that's a way around it yeah but if your species isn't as reproductively adept as rabbits, you'll have to be a bit more careful and actually try to survive. If every creature you made reproduced at an extremely high rate, wouldn't that take some of the fun and challenge out of the game?
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The_Wayward_Admiral
Spacefaring
The_Real_Slim_Shady
Atrox drew this awesome image of the Keldori!
Posts: 1,011
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Post by The_Wayward_Admiral on Dec 12, 2015 16:40:34 GMT
I don't know. When a creature uses r-strategy (or more colloquially, "spray and pray"), it doesn't invest very much energy in the offspring. So although there are more of them, putting the law of large numbers on their side, they don't receive the same social and learning benefits of a k-strategy offspring. So it would actually be a little more challenging to actually play as one, even if your species is less likely to go extinct. At least to my line of thought.
Edit; and maybe if your species is too successful the carrying capacity could be brought to bear against it.
Edit so that the hard science people don't hate me: R-strategy is bio-babble for making lots of offspring and taking no care of them, K-strategy is the opposite of that.
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Post by StealthStyleL on Dec 12, 2015 17:17:53 GMT
I guess those are both strategies that the player could employ depending on how they want to play.
Atrox, I will get back to you about the larvae stuff, I need to find what I wrote before.
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Post by NickTheNick on Dec 12, 2015 20:19:23 GMT
Aging is definitely going to be in the stage. The cycle of surviving and growing up, reproducing, and playing as the offspring is the whole focus of the Aware Stage, and as you said playing as the adult every time takes away a lot of the challenge. BBC's The Ballad of Big Al is a good example of the inspiration behind this part of the game (Obviously though, things will play out differently based on how your species grows up and reproduces).
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Dec 12, 2015 21:37:06 GMT
StealthStyleL you have made a convert of me. I really like that idea, and the only thing I would add is this: I think that once the player grows up, they should be able to choose to play out their creature to its death or become one of the offspring (thus allowing for grow-until-mate play as well as rampaging-about-the-place play). I think there are gonna be mating seasons that will notify you when its time to mate, but I don't think you have to either Awesome. I would love a mating season if I played the game.
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Post by Rowdy on Dec 15, 2015 18:02:56 GMT
On the note of aging though, how will that be determined, I'm curious? By health? Fitness in terms of their place in the food chain of their home environment?
Various species "age" differently over separate timespans. I think the only way to solve this in any other way would be to allow for setting an aging rate. I think that maybe, given types of aging, we could pick out options (which, left up to me, would have quirky naming schemes) like [dead-in-days]/[weekly wonder]/[month-long manner]/[years over yonder]/[decades of not-yet-dead].
So that way, a player could have their species be more similar to a butterfly's lifespan or a tortoise's, if they so choose, with a number designating the set amount of time given their now-set option. Of course there would be a limit, so I assume that the numbers one could choose might be preset between certain intervals (something like 1 - 99?). This could likely be edited as they go in the creature editor (with a "Recommended" option, to boot, for realism's sake).
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Post by StealthStyleL on Dec 15, 2015 20:41:26 GMT
I think it should be relative to size and determined by the computer. It's not realistic to make a giant kangaroo-elephant-Jar Jar Binks monster and then set it to only live a week.
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The_Wayward_Admiral
Spacefaring
The_Real_Slim_Shady
Atrox drew this awesome image of the Keldori!
Posts: 1,011
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Post by The_Wayward_Admiral on Dec 15, 2015 21:16:11 GMT
Maybe the computer could use size to determine a minimum and maximum lifespan, and then allow the player discretion of the number in between. Just a thought to hybridize the approaches.
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