[CheshireKatt]

I'm baaaaaaack...

This time with thoughts on how Space Monsters could be implemented.

Have a file for storing monster designs (Monsters.txt?). This file would contain ship designs for monsters (hull tech#, # of components, component tech#'s, name, description), as well as several important features:

Ship-specific AI -- not all monsters act in the same way.

Monster Severity -- if the game determines a monster is supposed to show up, this lets it know which ones are meaner than others, to compare with how mean a monster it wants. Maybe it could pick more than one monster, so there's an entire fleet (wing?) of Space Dragons roaming around the galaxy being mean to people.

A flag to indicate that the monster can ONLY come from a planetary event (you reach a planet that has a Monster event on it and a severity event, and maybe a monster name on it -- it first looks for monsters with the specified NAME, and if it doesn't find one (or finds duplicates), consults the severity and takes the one closest to the severity listed on the planet. If there's a tie, or no severity is specified, it just makes a random pick. Planet monsters will NEVER leave orbit of the planet they're guarding.

(Can anyone tell I _REALLY_ want an Orion in my game, complete with massively powerful Guardian, and Ancient Artifacts where I can SPECIFY what Techs it has, and another list that it chooses 3-5 randomly from?)

A flag setting whether or not the monster is boardable -- it doesn't necessarily make sense to board and take control of a Space Amoeba, for example, but maybe the Guardian of Orion might be capturable?

Monsters would be a perfect place to have "special" techs, that leave stuff in battle hexes, hit multiple hexes, shove ships around, that kind of thing.

Then, it's easy to put in abilities for 'em:

Add new monster techs to the tech tree, easy enough (just don't let anyone get 'em as part of a normal research progression).

Add new graphics to the components dir for the monster components.

Add ship pictures to either Pictures\Races\Monsters, or just Pictures\Monsters for the monsters.

--Chesh really has too much time on his hands.