Space Monsters!!!

[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.

[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

[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 ]

[Suicide Junkie]

They have to start with a planet, even if it has no facility tech to build starting facils on it. SE4 always gives you a homeworld.
However, given a space yard to start with, and multiple races, they should kill off each other's homeworlds, leaving only the space borne monsters.

[Puke]

without a planet, they go idle and dont fight. they will have a single cloaked planet (cloaking facility or starbase) and not be able to colonize beyond that.

Rollo, im up for it if you are. drop me an email (my address should be visible to the forum here) and we can get started on a preliminary draft of what we will be doing.

[Egregius]

Well since I was dieing for a monster-mod, I started building my own.

I took the only basis I could find: some components and shipsizes from the neomod. Excellent way of covering stuff, but I enhanced a lot of stuff.

The mod gives you 'space monster' as special ability, I made it number 7 as I gave borg borg-tech as racial too. 'Space monster' gives the holder space monster-tech, which starts at level 1 (which is currently also the max level).

Space monster tech gives 4 shipsizes: small, medium, large and gargantuan space monster, with various sizes (the big one is BIG). In the mod they indicated to special pictures, but I just used standard shipsizes to be compatible with TDM so I wouldnt get a range-check error. I also used the Cephalopeia shipset, but the Species 8472 set works brilliantly as well.

The special vehicle sizes have the special 100% maintenance reduction.

The components consists of organic-cost-only comps (all just one level techs):
Organic Armor - gives supplies per turn
Central Neural Complex - Acts as bridge, but I added 1000 defense turrets power and self-destruct power so space-monsters wont be boarded.
Internal Organs - Life support, added regenerative capabilities to this one, as first all components had it which we know is bugged if one type gets destroyed.
Connective Tissue - Crew Quarters
Organic Gravitational Core - Engine with big movement, only one allowed
Plasma Bolt, Lightning Ray, Enveloping Acid Globule - weapons
Reproductive Organs - Acts as spaceshipyard!
Senses - attack bonus and long range scanner
Chambers - Cargo
Planet Killer -
Supply Reservoirs - supply
Gravitational Warp Heart - Open and close warppoints
Harvester - Important ability: to harvest organics!

I loved these ideas from the author of the neomod. Had to tweak one another, but still. Made an AI that wont make treates, but will only get angrier (I hope).

What I still need is a speechfile with everything garbled (shouldnt be that hard), a way to make the AI not build anything except the monster vehicle sizes, so they dont build colony ships, and a way to make the AI use ONLY the monster tech, not anything else (thus any research they do should be moot). And to figure out how to get the ai to actively harvest organics from various places while spawning new vehicles from there.
And a way to get them to attack occasionally, but not all-out suicidal, with or without home-planet.

Maybe I'll make the space monster tech multi-levelled so they build up to bigger space-monsters as they progress (as long as they got their homeworld), and make their weapons evolve.

Oh and is there a way to add master computer capability to a component without confusing the AI (thus that the AI still uses internal organs and connective tissue).

[ 18 January 2002: Message edited by: Egregius ]

[jimbob]

Space monsters = Great!

Egregius, it would be good if the monster planet (pref. hidden) was capable of research. Then the monsters could get tougher and tougher as time goes on... a challenge even into the end game.
And to keep the monsters alive longer, give them very strong planet based shielding from the get-go... even if they are discovered, the most a player can do is intercept the enemy ships as they're manufactured... er, born.

For the resource gathering, I'd imagine that the monsters would also remote mine unoccupied planets and asteriod belts, but with very high efficiency. This would reduce the value of the planets as they went, which would make the game more challenging for human players... just imagine, giant space cows grazing the moons of Patueria IV!
[Edit] And the Great Vaccume-Elk Herd from the Jasperitis Nebula leaving random scatterings of explosive scat/poop (mines) throughout the Banffia system as they migrate to Kananasky XII [end Edit]

The mod(s) sound great, and I'm really looking forward to them,

Skol,
jimbob

[ 18 January 2002: Message edited by: jimbob ]