Mail Order Monsters

[Puke]

This thread was not updated for a while, but Mail Order Monsters 2 was a grizzly defeat for the humans. Overpowered monsters had maximum tech and planet eating worms floating around the quadrant before we even had light cruisers, and the meager mortals were eaten alive.

But after some mooks in the IRC channel egged my into it, Mail Order Monsters III is accepting players. unfortuneatly, I see that Covert Jaguar has the same idea (except that he is using Adamant and not Devnull) and that i'm compeetign with him for monster hunters.

Oh well, im sure there are enough SE4 players to go arround. come in and be eaten. And if Rollo isnt to busy being a Beta Tester, he can even come eat some humans.

http://seiv.pbw.cc/text/index.jsp?me...%3fgame=es3td7

[Combat Wombat]

Don't forget about the Invasion! PBW game going right now with 3 human player monsters against 7 human player normal races. It's not clear whos going to win, I have star destroyers but they have about 180+ more ships than me...

[CovertJaguar]

Actually it was Braincyi's idea. But he bailed on us in the first game and totally screwed up the monsters when he made them. So, we restarted with human monsters. The game is full and we will be starting soon. It's really more of a Roleplaying game.

CW, you have star-destroyers already. But then you are kind of insulated from the monsters in the corner. They have to go through me to get to you. I'm having a hard time just holding them off. They keep depopulating random systems.

[Puke]

id love to hear some more game reports from the ones you have in progress. I dont know how different Devnull monsters are from Adamant, I thought Fyron had pretty much just stolen most of Rollo's code.

But in Devnull, i cant imagine the humans having any chance unless they find, contain, and kill the monsters before they reach tech level 3 or so. what sort of artificial restrictions are you placing on the monster players? No cloaking suns is a must.

do you prohibit them from colonizing? prohibit them from researching non-monster technology? prohibit them from using monster cloaks on anything besides a homeworld? force them to use AI design ministers only?

and how is the game going so far?

[douglas]

The game has yet to start, but here are a list of our restrictions:

Enforced by the mod design:
No colonizing
Very little non-monster technology researchable

Artificial Restrictions:
50% intelligence
Naturalist trait (-40% planet capacity)
No offensive intelligence ops
No non-planetary space yards
Monster cloaks allowed on bases only
No Subterranean trait (+20% planet capacity)
No monster fleets except specifically against targets that have proven they can handle single ships and smaller groups.

The combination of 50% intelligence and Naturalist with 3 homeworlds and a 100000 first turn bonus led in test games to discovering monster tech level 2 (first ships) on turn 11, 3 (warp openers/closers) on turn 41, and 4 (multiplex tracking, shield-skipping weapons, shields) on turn 94. I didn't test further than that. With two space monster races in the game, a treaty between them will speed things up a little bit for the later tech levels. I, as one of the monsters, plan to keep a permanent home garrison of 10 ships at every homeworld, always consisting of the latest and greatest I've got, which will give the normal races 21 turns to expand before any monster ships set out, and will delay each improvement on monster ships by 10 turns. The ban on base/ship space yards limits the monsters to three new ships at most each turn. With 5 normal races for every monster race, a large galaxy, and no monster expansion, I think the normal races may have a chance.

[Fyron]

Puke said:
I dont know how different Devnull monsters are from Adamant, I thought Fyron had pretty much just stolen most of Rollo's code.

It's not stealing when Rollo gives you permission to use it.

Puke said:
prohibit them from researching non-monster technology?

In Adamant, most technologies require a paradigm trait, so very little is open to properly set up space monsters.

douglas said:
No offensive intelligence ops
Monster cloaks allowed on bases only

Aren't these mod restriction anyways? I could have sworn they only had access to counter intelligence and that monster cloaks were only mountable on bases. I'll have to fix these if this is not the case.

[douglas]

Imperator Fyron said:
douglas said:
No offensive intelligence ops
Monster cloaks allowed on bases only

Aren't these mod restriction anyways? I could have sworn they only had access to counter intelligence and that monster cloaks were only mountable on bases. I'll have to fix these if this is not the case.

Monster Cloaks are Ship/Base/Sat (not that monsters have any satellite hulls to put them on). Quite a number of intelligence projects require only Sabotage Operations or Espionage Operations technology, neither of which requires any racial tech.