Engulfment Rebalancing

[Deus-Codes]

Brief Description of What This PR Does

Current changes include:

• Increased size discrepancy needed to engulf something
• Slightly sped up the rate at which engulfed chunks are turned into compounds
• Slightly reduced amount of compounds retrieved from engulfed items
• Slightly debuffed amount of digestion time decrease from enzymes

This makes baseline engulfment just a touch less powerful, making lysosomes more of a worthy investment. The effort I'm going for is to make your ingested material go away quicker, so that you get the bonus you deserve for a successful hunt, but don't get to survive off of one or two hunts for the entire generation. This incentivizes adaptations to become a more voracious hunter - incentivizing pulling cilia, lysosomes, etc. - instead of utilizing digestion as a one-and-done sort of thing.

I'm experimenting a bit with the compound digested percentage and speed, so that could be subjected to change - regardless, a change to the size discrepancy ratio is needed.

Related Issues

Progress Checklist

Note: before starting this checklist the PR should be marked as non-draft.

• PR author has checked that this PR works as intended and doesn't
  break existing features:
  https://wiki.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/wiki/Testing_Checklist
  (this is important as to not waste the time of Thrive team
  members reviewing this PR)
• Initial code review passed (this and further items should not be checked by the PR author)
• Functionality is confirmed working by another person (see above checklist link)
• Final code review is passed and code conforms to the
  styleguide.

Before merging all CI jobs should finish on this PR without errors, if
there are automatically detected style issues they should be fixed by
the PR author. Merging must follow our
styleguide.

[revolutionary-bot]

The lead programmer for Thrive is currently on vacation until 2025-07-07. Until then other programmers will try to make pull request reviews, but please be patient if your PR is not getting reviewed.

PRs may be merged after multiple programmers have approved the changes (especially making sure to ensure style guide conformance and gameplay testing are good). If there are no active experienced programmers who can perform merges, PRs may need to wait until the lead programmer is back to be merged.

[domin2ktr]

I think we need to increase the amount of glucose we get to make heterotrophy truly playable, since right now heterotrophy feels like it gives very little glucose (this is especially noticeable in the late microbe stage and multicelluar stage).

[Deus-Codes]

I think we need to increase the amount of glucose we get to make heterotrophy truly playable, since right now heterotrophy feels like it gives very little glucose (this is especially noticeable in the late microbe stage and multicelluar stage).

I think if we tweak how fast the nutrients get released, even smaller amounts of glucose feel more meaningful (.5 released over 2 seconds compared to released over 4 seconds makes a sizable difference). Right now, I dropped the amount of compounds released by .1 compared to the original, but this is subject to change. I think it feels fine right now considering the speed increase, but I'm more adept at Thrive compared to other people, so that could be subjective. I welcome playtesting feedback

[Deus-Codes]

Intended to make this prior commit its own pull request to neatly organize movement changes, but I guess this will do here for now. Fits in to making predation a bit more viable anyways

[Patryk26g]

These adjustements seem like a good change for me. I haven't playtested these, but I will later

[Patryk26g]

I really like the size difference changes but in my opinion speeding up the rate of digestion is not a good idea

[hhyyrylainen]

Seems like there's still some ongoing discussion about the changes.

I'll say that the community members often have trouble knowing the size difference:

Increased size discrepancy needed to engulf something

So if it isn't 50% bigger, then nobody will remember it easily and we'll be spreading misinformation... so I'm kind of not on board with that change as it would be a pain to make sure everyone knows that change and going through the Thriveopedia and other in-game text to make sure there's no outdated information.

[hhyyrylainen]

I think it doesn't make sense for the AI to mutate faster on easy mode than on normal mode.

[hhyyrylainen]

Also @GameDungeon mentioned on Discord that we really shouldn't have the mutation multiplier above 1 for any of the preset difficulties.

[hhyyrylainen]

This has the potential to cause a visual size inconsistency as this is kind of meant to match the 2x visual size multiplier...

[revolutionary-bot]

We are currently in feature freeze until the next release.
If your PR is not just a simple fix, then it may take until the release to get reviewed and merged.