Plants are too powerful. I think we want a world where there are significant morphological costs to balance out the huge advantage of being able to receive free nrg from nowhere each cycle. The time as come to do something about it.
I know we've talked about not making this split so artificial and instead modeling some autotrophic substance bots can manufacture, which would have some gradual morphological impact proportional to amount, etc. but I want to do something simpiler and sooner. Here's my plan.
If you are an autotroph, you:
Can't voluntarily move. I plan to disable .up, .dn, .sx and .dx for autotophs. You can still be unfixed. Battery bots can carry you around, collisions will move you. You can move voluntarily using ties, tielength and fixing multi-bot cells like inchworm (think creeping vines), but individual cells can't move on their own.
You can't shoot -1, -3 or -6 shots. Yes, there are picther plants and venus fly traps and such in nature that supplament their solar intake by trapping insects and such but there are none that really hunt or are venomous that I know of. There are poisionous ones of course and that will still work but poision is passive and defensive whereas venom is active. Even with these restrictions, there are still nasty aggressive strategies plants can employ to supplement their nrg intake - using memory shots to fix non-autotrophs that happen to pass by and wait until they die and decay into corpses, etc.
You can't tie to a non-veg. They can tie to you and if they do, you can employee all the tricks to sharenrg in your favor, etc., but you can't initiate a tie to them. Ties between veggies are fine.
Veggie viruses can't infect non-autotrophs and vice versa.
Now, before everybody gets all fired up, let me just point out that these restrictions can serve to drive plant evolution in a different and very interesting direction. Up until now, it's been all about building or evolving the most agressive organism. Kill or be killed. But now with these restricitons, plants have to give that up. They can't hope to compete in that way. So, their evolution (or design) becomes all about defense, about not getting eaten or at least not getting eaten down to nothing. They can use all that free nrg to build shell, build slime, become poisionous, evolve counter tie tactics, only become poisionous for specfic species that don't know when to stop eating, etc. Plants will become interesting in the ways they defend. Some will defned better than others. Non-autotrophs will become descriminating in their plant eating habits, eating some plant species and not others. In some cases, getting past a plants defenses may require such specialized DNA that some bots focus on this exclusivly, becoming herbavores. In others, it may not be worth it to try to get past a plant's defenses and thus some bots may find becoming strict carnivores more appealing...
Anyway, this seems to me to be a simple, straight forward way to balance things out...
Okay, let fly with the comments.