Population dynamics

moopli wrote:

Fights are a whole 'nother ball game, of course.

One idea I had for fighting is to make "fight" into a compound. I've talked to Seregon about it a bit but we didn't make any decisions (also we should get him involved with this kind of discussion as this really is his wheelhouse).

Basically your species burns energy (ATP, sugar, whatever it is) to make "fight" in the same way as it would for any other compound and then fight drains away over time. What this represents is the difference between a hedgehog and a cat. A hedgehog has a lot of defensive tools but very little "fight" (it will curl into a ball) but cats only have claws and teeth but loads of "fight" which lets them hunt very efficiently. What "fight" really costs you is just energy.

When you are calculating predation (and it looks like the compound system / pop dynamics will be heavily averaged over many encounters) the fight component is just the amount of tools your species has multiplied by how much "fight"it has in it's pool at that time.

"Movement" can work the same (you burn energy to make it as a compound, it drains away over time) (we could even have 2 types, sprint energy and sustainable travel) and even things like "intelligence" or your "lookahead" could be modelled like that.

Then auto-evo can adjust the amount of fight and movement you are making (maybe it's better to be a galapagos turtle than a bull, you save so much energy) and we can use those numbers in calculations of combat, chases etc.

But as I say Seregon is going to do a big post about where we've got on the compound system / population dynamics and when we can plug all this into that. It could be a while (as life is busy and it's a big post) and he is a brilliant guy and well worth waiting for!