Here’s the elephant in the room I think a lot of our discussion should be centered around:
Consider an organism that has the ability to eat seeds and absolutely nothing else, for a total energy of 1.1. Call it a locust.
Because each species gets a starting energy budget rather than a starting population, Locusts will have a starting population of almost 1000, while an organism with a size of 20 would have a starting population of only 50.
A seed gives five energy, and reproduction is energy over cost, so every locust that eats a seed means about five new locusts in the next generation. That population advantage will only increase until they hit carrying capacity. Grassland has 2000 seeds, so it can sustain something like ten thousand locusts.
You might expect predators to handle them, but a locust’s corpse gives less food than the least nutritious plant. Most predators when faced with locusts will starve to death while having a successful hunt every day.
The only way for predators to compete in the same biome is for them to be small, with a cost of 4 or less, small enough to have population growth while eating nothing but locusts. Potentially these small predators could then provide a food supply for larger predators, but if small predators aren’t submitted or go extinct, larger predators are probably locked out of biomes that have locusts in them. This would be good news for vegetarians, who would then compete with each other over the non-seed food sources.
If you’re feeling lazy I suggest submitting the locust design for one of the biomes with seeds, because it seems really strong.
Verified: the omnivore wipes them out in 40 generations in my test with both starting on grassland and no other animals in the simulation.
on the other hand:
if a specialized killer of the omnivore is added (weapons 2, speed 2, nothing else) then it eventually (85 generations) killed off the omnivore in my simulation and was able to subsequently co-exist with the minimal seed-eater, which it also predated but not enough to crash the population. Theoretically, the omnivore could move somewhere else, but no such populations got established in my simulation.
(edit: post bugfix, this was 38 generations and 114 generations. The omnivore did spread to other biomes, but its nemesis spread too and wiped out the colonies before dying out in the biomes without the mimimalist)
Another update: I have reduced the price of temperature adaptations from 5 to 2. Previously, it was barely possible to survive in the tundra even under ideal conditions.
Here’s the elephant in the room I think a lot of our discussion should be centered around:
Consider an organism that has the ability to eat seeds and absolutely nothing else, for a total energy of 1.1. Call it a locust.
Because each species gets a starting energy budget rather than a starting population, Locusts will have a starting population of almost 1000, while an organism with a size of 20 would have a starting population of only 50.
A seed gives five energy, and reproduction is energy over cost, so every locust that eats a seed means about five new locusts in the next generation. That population advantage will only increase until they hit carrying capacity. Grassland has 2000 seeds, so it can sustain something like ten thousand locusts.
You might expect predators to handle them, but a locust’s corpse gives less food than the least nutritious plant. Most predators when faced with locusts will starve to death while having a successful hunt every day.
The only way for predators to compete in the same biome is for them to be small, with a cost of 4 or less, small enough to have population growth while eating nothing but locusts. Potentially these small predators could then provide a food supply for larger predators, but if small predators aren’t submitted or go extinct, larger predators are probably locked out of biomes that have locusts in them. This would be good news for vegetarians, who would then compete with each other over the non-seed food sources.
If you’re feeling lazy I suggest submitting the locust design for one of the biomes with seeds, because it seems really strong.
I also came up with this strategy (I called them weevils), but I think it’s beaten by a small omnivore that eats both seeds and weevils/locusts.
Tested:
Verified: the omnivore wipes them out in 40 generations in my test with both starting on grassland and no other animals in the simulation.
on the other hand:
if a specialized killer of the omnivore is added (weapons 2, speed 2, nothing else) then it eventually (85 generations) killed off the omnivore in my simulation and was able to subsequently co-exist with the minimal seed-eater, which it also predated but not enough to crash the population. Theoretically, the omnivore could move somewhere else, but no such populations got established in my simulation.
(edit: post bugfix, this was 38 generations and 114 generations. The omnivore did spread to other biomes, but its nemesis spread too and wiped out the colonies before dying out in the biomes without the mimimalist)
Update: I changed the efficiency of predation from 0.80 to 0.95. Eating a locust now gives slightly more food than the least nutritious plant.
Another update: I have reduced the price of temperature adaptations from 5 to 2. Previously, it was barely possible to survive in the tundra even under ideal conditions.
I was thinking of the name Tribbles for this strategy. Locusts would be fast, I think.