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A limit for heterotroph bots, and normal veggie repro

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Welwordion:
For  Evo sim I like to run bots as veggies so I can limit thier number, however I read somehwere there is a certain fail chance for veggie reproduction and indeed there are some bots who do not reproduce correctly when turned into a veg, so give me  a limit option for normal bots plz and an option to remove this fail chance.

EricL:
All veggies are prevented from reproducing when their population is above the limit.  When below the limit, a random 10% of veggies are allowed to reproduce each cycle.  If this is not what you are seeing, it is a bug.  

Without this limititation, all veggies would be allowed to reproduce in the cycle in which the population falls below the limit with the result that the actual population in the sim would approach twice the actual specified limit.

Why are dynamic costs insufficient for controlling hetertroph populations?

Welwordion:
Well, I am using several setting schemes where negative costs are used to provide evolving bots with energy,
(mainly if I start with Zero or Randombots) as such higher cost would actually mean more energy for the bots
(tried to put negative values in the dynamic cost but either I did it wrong or it does not work)
but cause of the 10% repro rule of veggies I can not just simulate my bots as veggies.

( I often introduce shepherd bots, bots that fire at nearby bots but are fixed and do not mutate or reproduce.
I  sometimes try to combine this with light gravity to force the bots to invent escape movement, but you need a high shepherd density and lot of manual interfering to prevent black holes, and if you put age cost on its not calculated per body so its hard to fit this to body cost in a way shepherds are not affected to much, which is a reason you prefer running your bots as veggies as you can give them a numerical energy. Though I guess I can simple use the veggie respawn for that matter )

EricL:

--- Quote from: Welwordion ---Well, I am using several setting schemes where negative costs are used... (tried to put negative values in the dynamic cost but either I did it wrong or it does not work)
--- End quote ---
I explictly prevent negative values for the cost multiplier.  I was not aware anyone was using negative costs.  I could change this so as to allow the cost multiplier to go negative.  If I did this, then you could make all your costs positive, using a negative multiplier and then allow dynamic costs to move it up or down to maintain your population in a specific range....


--- Quote from: Welwordion ---but cause of the 10% repro rule of veggies I can not just simulate my bots as veggies.
--- End quote ---
I'm still not sure I follow you on this.  Yes, assuming the population is below the limit, there is a 90% chance a bot won't be able to reproduce when it tries to, but in the aggregate, bots that exhibit better reproductive fitness will still do better.  Is this really a problem statisticly speaking?


--- Quote from: Welwordion ---( I often introduce shepherd bots, bots that fire at nearby bots but are fixed and do not mutate or reproduce.
I  sometimes try to combine this with light gravity to force the bots to invent escape movement, but you need a high shepherd density and lot of manual interfering to prevent black holes, and if you put age cost on its not calculated per body so its hard to fit this to body cost in a way shepherds are not affected to much, which is a reason you prefer running your bots as veggies as you can give them a numerical energy. Though I guess I can simple use the veggie respawn for that matter )
--- End quote ---
Hmm.  In my evo sims, I generally don't use costs at all.  They select for nrg effeciency yes, but this often leads to selection for smaller genomes adn bots that do less and less in my sims.  Instead, these days I use shepard bots as the exclusive means of population control.  I just take the baddest, boldest, most aggressive bot I can find and turn him into a shepard that limits his own popualtion (using .totalbots and .totalmyspecies) and only hunts when the popualtion as a whole climbs above some threshold.  In soem cases, I turn them into care givers if the popualtion falls too far, having them shoot the evo bots with nrg shots...

Would you be cool with simply letting the cost multipler go negative?  I suppose I could add an option to allow the user to specify the percentage of veggies that will be randomly allowed to reproduce when the population is below the threshold (you could choose 100%) but I dislike adding more knobs to the UI.  Things are too complex already.

Testlund:

--- Quote from: EricL ---I suppose I could add an option to allow the user to specify the percentage of veggies that will be randomly allowed to reproduce when the population is below the threshold (you could choose 100%) but I dislike adding more knobs to the UI.  Things are too complex already.
--- End quote ---

I think this would be a good idea actually. Personally I didn't have any big jumps in populations before you added this limit, (maybe just a few 100 for Alga Minimalis when they were below the upper treshold). Also with evolved bots they don't tend to reproduce exactly at the same time anyway. So I find it a little unfair that some godly power just point to a veggie telling it 'you may reproduce'.  

There's room for one more function in the Population Control square on the general tab.  

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