more balance for differently sized creatures (warning this is a bit of an essay)

[doo158]

EDIT::!:!:!:!: don't read this shit. having reflected some i started to realize changes like these would be total garbage, and the option to increase the reproduction cost for movers is honestly a way better fix for this issue than whatever convoluted mess i could come up with. if you wanna read this i'll leave it hanging around but whatever

after reading #59, i decided to conjure up some ways to introduce some balance between organisms of different sizes. as the post describes, smaller, faster breeding, and space filling movers consistently choke out everything else in the game and create seas of their own living bodies. I thought i would go through some of the disparities between organisms of smaller and larger sizes and offer some solutions.

one of the first major issues that comes to mind is that overall, predation doesn't have much of an impact on the ecosystem. typically, its only effect is that organisms will be pressured into evolving them as a self defense measure until everyone has them. still effectively the same problem we started with. killers are only really effective against smaller creatures, due to their low health. however, it isn't much of a blow, considering the large, fast-breeding population will replace every casualty with 3 more individuals. for larger creatures, due to the already arbitrary nature of killer cells, their large size is hardly an advantage.

so, small creatures are effectively without flaws, and large creatures are effectively without strengths. it is very obvious why those obnoxious little flies seem to inhabit every single game regardless of settings.

as far as solutions goes, i can think of a few. the first one alone would probably be an actual gamechanger, so much so that if it were to be added, i recommend adding a footnote beside it to actually tell the player just how important it is. it is simply the ability to change the damage of killer cells. currently, the only 2 options are for killers to either do next to no damage, or instantly pop everything they come into contact with. when the number is set to infinity, the miniscule benefit of having a larger size vanishes. when set to a mild flick, it is somewhat difficult for the most likely 4 celled creatures we have at this point, (eye, mouth, mover, killer,) to be killed in battle, also resulting in size being somewhat negated. if it were possible to set the damage multiplier yourself, you would be able to make large creatures much more protected, while drastically increasing the danger levels for smaller creatures.

the second idea of mine, while a bit of a big change, would be to change the definition of "adjacent" in the game's context to also include diagonal cells. this would make killer cells far more dangerous, doubling their area of effect. combined with the 1st change, smaller creatures would barely stand a chance against predators, and their populations would be far thinner. this is a much smaller paragraph lol.