Dogscoff - Uh oh, space worms... Did you manage to kill one, yet?
In my current game I had the greatest difficulties with the monsters. They started rather close to me, opened warp points everywhere, glassed many colonies and "ate" one homeworld. I was so busy with defending that I totally missed that the other AIs were building huge empires. I had good relations with all of them and the trade kept me alive pretty well. By turn 190 the Vikings had a score of 3.5M and declared war on me. The worst part was the loss of trade and the Vikings were hitting me heavily with intel. Shortly after that I lost all other trade, because of communication mimics and was at war with everybody. Also I lost another homeworld due to PPP. I glassed all nearby Viking colonies and the resulting riots took a heavy toll on their score (down to 1.7M). They lost most of their intel points and now I can defend against them. Still the monsters are very dangerous. Lost a fleet some turns ago that was hit by 96 drones
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Glad that you like the mod so far, let me know how you do in your game. Do you find the monsters too tough / too easy to beat? I guess it depends largely on how close you start to them, but I am considering toning them down a bit (apart from fleshing them out, of course). Is that appropriate or am I just a whimp?
Cold Steel - Actually none of the graphics for the monsters are missing, everything needed for them is there
. But I know what you mean and you are right this is a work still in progress. I should point out that the monsters are not supposed to be a regular shipset and I just included the gfx that they actually use in order to keep the mod as small as possible. I am somewhat reluctant to add useless pics and thus increase the size of the mod. How about if I add really small 1 pixel b/w bitmaps to the mod as placeholders?. Would that work with your programm ? Maybe the gaps would be less ugly then.
Urendi Maleldil - Yeah, monster hunters would be cool. I still have a lot to do with the monsters themselves, though. Step 2 of the monster project is already in the planning and there are some fixes that need to be done before that as well. One problem that I am seeing, though, is the politics for the monster hunters. Unless MM adds feuds to the politics (that has been requested by some people and would make a lot of sense for races like Eee vs. Drushocka or Rage vs. Vaxin), I currently do not see a way to do the hunters correctly. For now, I guess, human players have to take up the role as monster hunters
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Well, it is way past my bedtime...
Rollo