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Veggies are too powerful

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MacadamiaNuts:
Here's an idea:

The veggie feeding bar now specifies the light intensity in %.
A new bar allows to specify how much free waste there is in the sim.
Pond mode puts more free waste in the lower side, opposite to the light intensity.

(nonzero) .getwaste -> gets the free waste as factor of body size.

Waste digestion turns a % of the total waste into energy each cycle: the % is specified by the light intensity. At 100% light intensity, a bot converts all the waste it gets into energy. Waste digestion works for all bots, since even predators can use small amounts of minerals.

At 50% intensity, and 1 point of waste per 10 body points, the A bot gets:

A: body 200
Turn 1: waste: 20, converted waste: 10
Turn 2: waste: 30, converted waste: 15
Turn 3: waste: 35, converted waste: 17.5
Turn 4: waste: 37.5, converted waste: 18.75

That means that, if the veggie allows waste to build up, it will maximize the energy. If it grows, it will get more waste and energy too, though maximizing the energy has an increased risk of bad waste effects.

Bots will choose then between sensible DNA that doesn't allow waste disruption but allows complex behaviour, and dumb DNA that can manage higher amounts of waste but it's too random to compete against the sleek hunters.

shvarz:

--- Quote ---The problem I see with this on/off switch is that being able to instantly switch in and out of plant mode when food is scarce or when not being pursued or when your nrg is low, etc. is such a huge benifit that any hand authorred bot that does not do this will be at such a tremendous disadvantage that it will be obsolete and unable to compete.
--- End quote ---

It's possible to balance things out. Turn off the eyes for photsynthesizing bot and it becomes a sitting duck ready to be picked up by any predator.  But I'm not dead-set on this idea, I see the disadvantages.

I really thing it should be possible for a bot to be half-plant half-hunter, with a smooth gradient of handicap. Nums' veggie-body idea is reasonable, although I don't know whether it will handicap veggies enough. Turning off ability to shoot or tie does not seem fair.

Also, consider this: we can actually make it work without any handicaps to the veggies. Here's how: hunting has a built-in gradient of efficiency. One can be a poor hunter or a great hunter depending on the complexity and efficiency of DNA code. Being a veggie needs a similar built-in gradient. Just a switch between veggie and non-veggie is not enough. It should be possible to be a poor photosynthesizer and a great one, and it should be controllable from DNA. Being a good veggie should require a set of complex genes. If a bot does not use these genes, they will mutate and make it a poor veggie, thus giving a way for speciation.

EricL:
So, to paraprhase, your saying the human configures the environment to contain some amount of waste floating around, perhaps distributed as a gradient in pond mode (or in a more complex fashion via the Egrid) and that bots (via a new .getwaste sysvar) can extract this waste (up to some human defined amount per cycle and according to their body size) and store it within themselves.   We make waste the substance that determines how much free nrg a bot receives per cycle.   How much waste a bot is carrying determines how much free nrg it receives per cycle.  The more waste a bot has, the more nrg it receives but by not getting rid of waste, it runs the risk of triggering the altzheimers routine and having it's memory messed up.

Hmmm.   The implied tradoff inherent in risking altzheimers is interesting, but in the end I don't like it because I don't want to limit bots to making the choice between being a smart animal or a stupid plant.  I want bots to be able to be smart plants with very complex DNA that does lots of interesting things in precise ways replying on unmessed up memory.  I want thorns and poison and such.  I just think we should limit what things (or the magnitude of which) plants can do propotional to how much free nrg it receives.

So, I still favor a new substance bots must manufacture to absorb nrg which has morphological implications(explicit or consequencal) proportional to its amount.

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