Agents Discussion

Well, the agents do still exist, but instead of being excreted, they flow in the blood vessels of your multicellular organism. I think most toxins will die out just out of essence of it being too out-of-the-way to set up special poison glands. Remember however that many animals such as deer use large amounts of biological agents to attract mates and canines use agents in their urine to mark territory. So in a way they are chemical arsenals, but not in the way you would think.

Once you get up to a certain size, diffusion isn't going to spread toxins out as quickly as compared to your body size, so releasing toxins is no longer an efficient way to deal with your problems.

Scio, when getting to that size, I'm assuming it's in the multicellular and aware stages, isn't that when the various systems come in from the OE?

So let's try and wrap up all the possible effects for agents.

Agents

The components of an agent, as proposed by scio. Write each agent in this format.

Effect:
Magnitude:
Target:

Slime
Effect: Reduces movement speed.
Magnitude: Move Reduction = 1 - (1-.15)*(1.25^1-n)
n = Level
Target: All cells

Immortal_Dragon wrote:

Scio, when getting to that size, I'm assuming it's in the multicellular and aware stages, isn't that when the various systems come in from the OE?

You're correct. Once you're more than a few cells thick, you'll need a circulatory system, and from there you may get nervous, digestive, etc.

Paralytic
Effect: Decreases the efficiency of motile organelles
Magnitude: motile organelle efficiency reduction (effectively a speed reduction) = 1 - (1-.15)*(1.25^n-1)
Target: cilia, flagella, (lamellipodes?)

I want to point out that Nick chose a rather difficult one to model: slime.
Slime slows down organisms and anything else floating in the water, but doesn't target any specific organelle. For this reason, I think we should hold off on including it until we have a better idea of how fluid dynamics will be handled.

what does the magnitudes equation mean

klay2000 wrote:

what does the magnitudes equation mean

The equation specifies the efficiency of an agent by the number of times, n, it has been upgraded.

Scio, maybe we could make the slime agent act a bit differently, in that it is nothing more than a very viscous fluid. Increasing n values would increase the viscosity. This is assuming a full system of fluid physics and dynamics.

Also, did you make a typo at the end of your equation? (1.251-n) as opposed to (1.25n-1) or (1.25^n-1)

Here's another. (The names I give are placeholders. If you guys have ideas for the in-game names for these agents please tell. I think Paralytic is an example of a good name.)

Power-Dropping
Effect: Reduces processing power of compound processing organelles.
Magnitude: PP reduction = 1 - (1-.15)*(1.25^n-1)
Target: Mitochondria or Chloroplasts or Thermoplasts

That's how I would like us to do it, but wee'll have to wait and see if we can mix fluids of different viscosities.
As a matter of fact, that was a monstrous typo. Thanks for catching that.

Also, remember that all organelles are somehow processing compounds, so try to be very specific with names. I'd call that a "power dropping" compound, and restrict it to Mitochondria OR Chloroplasts OR Thermoplasts.

Okay, made the changes. How about calling it an "Organelle Depressant"?

Here is another type of agent:

Toxin
Effect: Inflicts damage to cell membranes in contact with the agent cloud until they burst.
Magnitude:
Target: Cells not in your species.

I left magnitude blank because I didn't know what to put. What would the average health of a cell be? How much damage should it do per second to a cell in contact with it?

NickTheNick wrote:

Okay, made the changes. How about calling it an "Organelle Depressant"?

How about "Enzyme inhibitor" or just "Inhibitor"

We can squabble over names later.

So I read through the microbe stage concept laid out by Nimbal on the wiki, and for the section on health I found that ATP will more or less be health. In that case, the Toxin agent cannot do damage to ATP (or at least I don't think that is possible), so instead it will do damage to the cell's membrane. Every second that a cell is in contact with a toxin cloud, it takes a percentage of damage to its membrane equal to the magnitude of the toxin agent. Reaching 100% damage would burst the membrane, spilling the contents of the cell and spelling death for that cell. If used against a player cell, it would prompt a respawn.

However, I was toying with the magnitude equation that was agreed upon some posts ago, and with using different n values I got very strange results. Remember n stands for the number of times the agent vacuole for that agent has been levelled up, or is it the level of the agent vacuole?. Either way, these were the results.



In the circle is the equation, and underlined is the equation with the input of I7 (one) for the n value. Now maybe it's just me, but I don't think its a very good idea for an agent vacuole to get worse as it levels up, to the point where the toxin actually heals the target cells.

I'll guess (without looking at the original formula) that you either wrote the formula wrong, or you are missing a parenthesis.

Okey, after looking at the original formula, it was option A. The original formula was:

Eff = l - (l-s) * a^(-n)

where the forula you put there is:

Eff = l - (l-s) * a^(n-1)

Actually, the other way you could write the formula is:

Eff = l - (l-s) * a^(1-n)

So you changed the two numbers in the last part. The right way of writing it in excel form is:

=(1-(1-0.15)*(1.25^(-l7))

Ahh, okay, thank you very much. I'm trying to get a formula for scaling the magnitude of damage the Toxin agent would do to a cell membrane. Do you have any ideas on how to scale it? I'm not really sure how much HP a cell membrane will have, so I'm working with percentages of the total health.

EDIT:

Eff = 35 - (35-15) * 2^(-n)
n	magnitude
0		15
1		19.61538
2		23.16568
3		25.89668
4		27.99744
5		29.61342
6		30.85648
7		31.81267
8		32.54821
9		33.11401
10		33.54924

 
How does this look for the scaling for the damage dealt by the Toxin agent? What the numbers in the magnitude column mean are the % of the total health of the membrane lost every second in contact with this agent.
Ex. At level 2, every second in contact with a toxin a cell's membrane would lose 23.17% of its total health.

Could adrenaline be implemented as an agent in the multicellular and aware stages? It could provide enhanced physical abilities in life or death situations.

@Nick That seems to kill them a bit fast doesn't it?

@TCC I think that sort of thing should be possible. Perhaps when your HP drops you gain a boost for a short period of time.

TheChubbyChihuahua wrote:

Could adrenaline be implemented as an agent in the multicellular and aware stages? It could provide enhanced physical abilities in life or death situations.

Agents are only a feature for the Microbe Stage and the early Multicellular Stage.

@Inca

Well in nature, fights are usually either fast or failed, and so I tried to stick with that. Also, once in contact with a Toxin cloud, chances are the cell is going to try and get out as fast as possible, and so it has to be able to damage them fast.

I guess that does make sense. The toxic cloud shouldn't be so big the player would struggle to get out of it though, because a lot of cells may be able to use toxic and we don't want everyone to be dieing all the time. From a gameplay POV it should be reasonably balenced with other methods of attack no? Or would the cost of the part that allows the toxic mean that not many cells have it?

Yeah, it won't be that large, however, all agent vacuoles cost the same, so if we were to increase the price of it for toxin agents, it would do the same for all other agents.

Other means of attack? I believe killing another cell with agents is mostly the only way of doing so. However, we will need to carefully balance them, as so far this seems the best one by far. If you kill a cell, it is for its resources, and this one leaves them intact, while other agents kill a cell by depleting one of its resources (which will last for many seconds even if generation of such resource is completelly stopped)

Can't you engulf cells as well though? Isn't that the main way of attack? I think there was another one as well, but I can't remember right now.

Wasn't that the injecting them with reproductive material, and when they burst out came another of the attacker's species?

And if I remember the Microbe facts correctly engulfing other cells was the main way to attack them.

I had an idea for an Agent. The "Sleeper" Agent. It's sort of like a parasite. It takes over the target cell's agent vacuoles and begins producing more of itself. When another cell consumes the infected cell, the Sleeper Agent is passed on to them. In addition, when a cell uses it's agents on another cell, it is also passed to the target cell. After a certain about of cells, determined by upgrades, they will become active and produce an effect designated by the player.

I don't know if this would work or if it's too OP, but I think it could be interesting.

EDIT: Something I thought of for balancing is that if an infected cell attacks you with its agents, you become infected as well, even if it was you who caused the infection.

So not going into formulas as i suck at math for the first versions of the game i think is enough to have 3 major types of agents:

-decreasing organelles function
And with agent for every organelle type many effects are present like reducing movement-agent targeting energy consumption on flagella and cilia, reducing energy output-targeting mitochondria, not sure how concept stands with catabolic-anabolic metabolism but targeting membrane regeneration, suppressing agent vacuoles, agents targeting membrane channels reducing cells intake of food.

-increasing organelles function
These could generally be with positive effect but could also be used as weapons making cells use more ATP then they could produce leaves them depleted of energy and makes them easy prey.

Now to note as Seregon said biochemical reactions use certain amount of chemicals so i guess their efficiency is described as reactions per time, so these agents just change the number of reactions per second lets say, then all these agents could use one formula.

-damaging agents(toxins)
These target the cells integrity, damaging membrane, cell wall, i was gonna say organelles but then the decreasing agents become useless as its better to just destroy mitochondria then just suppress its functions so i'll say agents targeting compounds and turning them into something toxic(closed system here) like ammonia, hydrogen peroxide i don't know be creative. Although if decreasing performance agents take effect right away and agents damaging organelles take time to do the job then both are good gameplay wise.

And the signal agents were talked about but i only see two possible effects attracting and repelling other cell.
Most of these things were discussed, if not all, so sorry for the long post wanted to put it together.