Space Monsters!!!

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

---

maybe if you gave their hulls the emissive armor ability with a threshold of about 150 points of damage

---

You would not require large capital ships with WMGs, but rather a stack of fighters.

50 Fighters with DUC I's can do 1000 damage per shot, as far as emissive armor sees it.

In one game, I was using Very Heavily shielded large fighters, that could destroy an AI baseship in three shots, and lose only one or two fighters.
(I had organic & religious, so 100% to-hit, plus lightning rays did almost 1200-1500 damage using only 30-40 fighters)

[Puke]

well, religious fighters are not exactly standard.. and even so, having a super stack of fighters would require about as much effort as having a dreadnaught, and its plauseable that a fighter swarm would overwhelm a space monster where as ships would not. i think the idea is still worthwhile wither or not it takes a dreadnaught or 50-100 large fighters.


besides, maybe one of the breeds of monsters would have massive PD abilities. any takers? im up for helping out on building the tech tree for the mod, but i cant script AI for a darn.

[Gryphin]

When I played the miniature Version of Star Fleet Battles monsters were always a pleasant unknown factor. In one senario It was Federation, Lyran, Ferengi, and a large unknown black moddle I made from scraps and stuff. It was at least twice the size of the largest crusier. During the inevitable slugfest between the Feds and the Lyrans, the Ferengi manged to tow it away. The "monster" was just a huge empty hulk whose value was less than that of fule spent dragging it. Even though the "moster" was harmless, it gnerated uncertainty and caution in the minds of otherwise overly bold players. In short, a monster that did nothing but patrol a system would be interesting and frustrating surprise.
Other types of monsters might be ones with nothing but Point Defence Cannons, or masive Shields and a few Capital Ship Missles. The goal would not be to create a dangerous or hard to kill ship, but rather an unknown element. this uncertainty in the minds of players would be compounded by the knowledge that is "Could" be a "Planet Killer".

[ 17 January 2002: Message edited by: Gryphin ]

[Rollo]

Puke,
I was thinking of (perhaps) adding space monsters to the Devnull Mod. Just one monster race for now to check it out and test it. I can do all the AI scripting, so if you are willing we can do this together. What we would need to do at start is make some kind of "battle plan" and nifty ship/component ideas for the monsters.

Oh, and a warning: I don't have a lot of time at the moment, so the whole thing is probably going to move rather sloooooowww.

Rollo

[geoschmo]

Ok, as far as making Monster planets harder to conquer...

I can confirm the ground defense ability does not work for facilities. I tried doing that when we were working out ways to toughen up planets in general.

Options:

Make a monster culture with bonuses to ground combat.

Raise the strength characteristric.

Build lot of troops. With monster tech you can make some really tough troops. This is kind of a waste of resources since they can be toasted from orbit. But you can make a monster-only weapon platform that is small (troop size) but has a lot of tonnage structure, and heaavily armored. Make them tough enough and yo can't bLast the troops from orbit, if the troops are strong enough you can't conquer the planet.

Give the monters another racial trait that is similer to the advanced storage racial trait, but with as hign as a percentage as will allow. The population expands on the homeworld, more population means mreo militia, and militia can;t be killed from orbit, without glassing the planet. Also with uber-adv storage, you can have more monster plats and monster troops.

If you do ALL of these together, that should make the planets unbeatable by anything but glassing.

Geoschmo

[geoschmo]

Also,

What exactly is the concern with monster planets being captured? What is it about the facilities that makes them so valuable?

Maybe you are planning this already, I didn't see it discussed, but you can make the monster ships self replicating (construction ability) and negative maintenance (old P&N mod did this IIRC) and the monsters won't be dependant on planets to survive. Make the planets ordinary, if they are captured, no big woop. And once they are captured or killed then the monster ships become impervious to intel attacks.

Actually that's good. Monster ships could build copies of themselves. But the planets (monster nurseries) can build them much faster. So the incentive for the players is to get the planets as quick as possible to cut down on the numbers, and then hunt down the ones that got away.

Although, I am not sure the monsters will attack your ships once there planets are gone, because they won't have any reason to get angry anymore. They might just go idle.

Geoschmo

[Phoenix-D]

IMO they shouldn't use planets at all if possible. Because if they use planets they show up in the politics screen, and the intelligence screen, and that's just weird

The hard part I think would be the AI, assuming no hard-code changes to allow it.

Phoenix-D