Just because I want to make a point, I made a sim of huge size, with only 5 starting veg but gave each veg a lot of energy, so it was sparsely populated clusters to make it reasonably hard, of course RUSSIA devastates the enviroment.
But, its also a incredibly efficient species, 4640 cycles in and The sim, purely for fun only had alga_mimalis_chloroplastus and RUSSIA, its now at 7 Corpse, 38 Alga_Mimalis_Chloroplastus and 1153 Russia!
WOW, how is 1K of my bot living off 38 veggies, I DO NOT KNOW, and its not like their even cancerous, about 40% of all the bots are 2/3rds of standard spawning size or greater.