Well yes I'm basicaly saying the salad is outrunning the hare
But my point is that veggies hold an advantage in gaining energy but also needs to be more carefull if there's a low veggy cap.
If a veggy is agressive it risks getting killed, but the extra energy gained from killing a bot may not help much in producing offspring since the cap is preventing it.
So this forces veggies to focus on running away most of the time.
So for instance a high veggy cap of 3000 combined with the standard 40 nrg per veggy per cycle would make the veggies a lot stronger than any bots could hope to be. Sure the bot can exceed 3000 in population but that's hardly a great advantage.
Keeping a low energy gain based on size and a more moderate veggy cap will make the veggies far less potent. Ofcourse you can also choose to set the mutations on the veggies lower when you're starting the sim, that might force the veggies to evolve slower. But the problem remains that it takes very litle for the veggies to become to elusive for the bots to follow, so you either need to start out with a strong bot able to handle what is to come or tweek either mutations or nrg gain and veggy cap to balance bots and veggies.
Personaly I think the best long term solution is to balance the energy gain mainly and I would still keep a moderate veggy cap. If the nrg gain is relative to size, the cancerous veggies should die because they don't gain enough energy to grow if they get too small. Also small veggies are a real pain for evo bots.
And you can always regulate the energy gain as you go along, as long as the changes aren't too drastic.
But can't say I know anything for sure, just sugestions, I usualy disable mutations on the alge, the new sim I'm running has mutations on the alge, but it hasn't become a problem yet.
The veggies ahve evolves something that ends up pushing a value into locations 1-15 randomly, so they squirm around, but the bots are still able to feed off them so far. (Also the bots are mutating more frequently than the veggies, and have a higher chance to insert code and lower chance to delete a large chunk, that may be helping them keep up with the alge)
But if the alge get too powerfull I plan on reducing energy gain, before they start to depend on it too much.