Andres - I liked the manta and spinal pics for space monsters. The pt.bmp made me think of Rodan (which sounded like it had jet engines) from the old 1950s Manga rubber Godzilla movies.
<nostalgia>
Man I loved those films...
</nostalgia>
Anyway... Rollo & Geo - Tell us more about your "vision" of the space monsters. Are they rare but hugely powerful or common as muck and comparable on strength to an empire ship?
Do they stay the same strength throughout the game or does their tech "evolve" as the game progresses?
Presumably you'll have a whole bunch of monster pics in a shipset (ie Escort = gas cloud, frigate= space spider, destroyer= Disembodied Head of Zsa Zsa Gabor etc) and then the monster AI will just build and release them. I suppose you'd have to enforce variety (ie prevent the AI from only using the largest hull available) by having monster type 1 as a "pop transport", type 2 an "attack ship" and then set the AI files to build them in equal quantities.
This reminds me of a cool idea I had Last night actually: To make the monsters more "organic" and less like ships, have a whole stack of custom hulls for them, with irregular sizes - so rather than each monster being exactly 500kt or exactly 350kt, give the hulls values like 534kt, 908 kt, 177kt. Make dozens of them, but distribute the images randomly throughout, so that the AI doesn't go through "phases" of producing only energy clouds, and then only crystalline entities as it advances through the tech. (Assuming it does advance through the tech. You may have used a "static" tech tree, which might work a lot better)
Something else that occurred to me: isn't there something hard coded into the game that even if it has the tech, the AI will only build ships up to light cruiser size for the first 40 turns, or something like that. I think there imight be 2 or 3 "thresholds". This could be useful to you, to ensure variety in hull sizes.
What about names? You can't have "giant carnivorous blimp" if the AI assigns that name to a space-wasp. You'd have to use either meaningless names, or give the monsters individual names like "Melcchor the Devourer" and "Spogroth the Wanderer".
Finally (for now anyway) will you be including a whole load of squidgy, crunchy, what-does-a-4-kilometre-long-slug-eating-a-spaceship-sound-like-anyway sound effects for the monster weapons? I hope so=-) The line-in on my Soundcard is fried, otherwise I'd offer to sample some sounds from "Destroy all Monsters" or "The Terror of MechaGodzilla" (which I happen to have on tape).
