Space Monsters!!!

[Suicide Junkie]

One MP colony ships are fine. There should be hundreds to thousands of bugships flying around, and you won't be able to catch them all. You won't stand a chance of stopping the colony ships if your own border systems are being pillaged by a hundred million Tons of Bugs (100 Dreadnaughts)

If you want, set every planet to build a "Bug Hive" as the first facility. It would provide Spaceyard, Atmosphere ConVersion, and sector cloak (just in case).
The rest of the facilities would be solar resource generators "Bug Farms"

It would really help to have a facility sector cloak that worked, so we could ensure one and only one sector cloak per planet. The bugs will be wasting a lot of resources on building excess cloaking bases, and might eventually run into the base limit We'd have uncloaked planets and planets with 21 cloak bases. Unless the AI guys know some tricks...

[ 24 January 2002: Message edited by: suicide_junkie ]

[geoschmo]

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but shouldn't their colony ships be a little more speedy otherwise they become real sitting ducks and would take far to long to colonize thus negating their real threat.

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Not if the colony ships have cloaking. You can't kill what you can't see.

quote:

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We'd have uncloaked planets and planets with 21 cloak bases. Unless the AI guys know some tricks...

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I am pretty sure this is doable, or the AI's now would be building tons of bases. It might take some trial and error to get it tweaked, and you might never get it to exactly one and only one per sector, but you could probably get close. But the facility would be better, cause that's less time the monster planet is exposed.

Geo

[ 24 January 2002: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Suicide Junkie]

For a Borg-like Monster, Cloaking the colony ships would be OK.
For swarm monsters, the player should be much to busy fending off the warships to worry about the colony ships. Colony ships can be set to swarm as well.

[Baron Munchausen]

I don't think these 'crutch' measures will ever make an effective 'space monster'. You'll have to play by self-restricting rules to make it work. I think MM has to alter the hardcode with some new AI routines and some special powers to make space monsters feasible.

[geoschmo]

I would agree if your goal is to make a giant space-borne monster like what you see in many sci-fi shows, it would be tough without hard-code changes.

But I think a very acceptable and playable "swarm" monster race could be done with the suggestions in this thread.

Geoschmo

[Suicide Junkie]

Baron:
Are you saying that you would find a monster race, using invisible & invulnerable planets, and spawning loads of Bugships & fighters every turn, easy to defeat?
You can't cut them off at the source, and they will only expand ever larger until you start blowing up every infested starsystem.

[Growltigga]

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Originally posted by geoschmo:
But I think a very acceptable and playable "swarm" monster race could be done with the suggestions in this thread.
Geoschmo[/QB]

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Goody, can we call said beast Growltigga's revenge?