Space Monsters!!!

[geoschmo]

Yep, I just tested this and there is no on/off for sector cloaks. They are always on.

Soemthing odd I found too was if the monsters planet is cloaked, then encountering other ships does not trigger a first contact. The monster ship has to actually come across a planet of another race to make contact. This could affect your a mod where the AI controls the monsters, so you need to take it into account.

Cloaks on fighters? According to the abilities file the sector cloak does not work on units, so I didn't even test it. If it does you could make the monster cloak a sattelite instead of a base. If you wanted that is.

Since it's so easy to cloak you could really make the Monsters tough if you let them colonize. Can you imagine stopping them as they spread acroos the quadrant? Everytime they plant another colony, it disapears!

Geoschmo

[Phoenix-D]

I meant regular cloaks for fighters, not sector

Phoenix-D

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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Since it's so easy to cloak you could really make the Monsters tough if you let them colonize. Can you imagine stopping them as they spread acroos the quadrant? Everytime they plant another colony, it disapears!

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OOOH... Cool scenario type thingy: a space-time experiment gone wrong, and the universe slowly collapsing around you and your neighbours.
Now that I think about it, there was a ST:TNG episode about that sort of thing.
Heh. When the universe shrunk smaller than the length of the ship, and the forward hull ceased to have ever existed:
Computer: Explosive decompression on deck 10.
Dr Crusher: Cause?
Computer: Structural Design Flaw.

If you made the Space Monsters zero-maintenance, and really good resource extractors, could you get them to build ringworlds, colonize, and "eat" the star too ?

[geoschmo]

Oh, man that was my all time favorite TNG episode! Let me see if I can remember....

Crusher: Computer. Specify nature of design flaw.

Computer: Ship exceeds paramaters of known universe.


ROFL! I loved that one.

[Rollo]

quote:

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Originally posted by Gryphin:
... Victrory condions for the human running this race could be any of the belo:
1) To have fun
2) Be based on a minumum of kt destroyed
3) How many turns it survives
...

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Hehehe, if the monsters are controlled by a human the victory conditions for all NON-monster players should be "Last to be wiped out" .

Rollo

[Growltigga]

I kind of lost this thread when people started talking about sector cloaks and all that high tech gizmo.

Question - practically, what form/style would the monsters take? If you want my tuppence worth, I always thought it would be cool to use either the high tech Borg style of beastie or preferably (given my decisively low tech triats) a sort of 'swarm' style thing a la the swarm mother in the Wild Cards books (ie the mutants not the marines)

If that were moddable - that would be the sort of monster I would love to play

[Suicide Junkie]

RE cloaking:
Translation:
- The spacemonsters lair can't ever be seen or attacked.
- The only way to kill the infested planets is to blow up the star.

The high-tech beastie thing is probably not scalable... At the beginning, they will be too powerful, and at endgame they will be only a nuisance.
The swarm could probably be handled better, since as the monsters take over new territory, their swarms will smoothly scale up. This is also probably good against minefields, since the loss of a hundred would not hurt the overall swarm later on in the game.

I would go with the swarm preferably, since the AI can screw up tactically with a few ships and not ruin the whole attack.

For variety, of course, there will have to be plenty of Borg monsters and middle of the road evil.

[Growltigga]

SJ - glad you agree, a few individual rampaging starbeasts (a la Starfleet Command II if any of you play that) would be quintessential to this game. The swarm would be the "uber-beast". I would think the following would be prerequisites:

1 no diplomacy whatsoever
2 sole purpose to occupy and destroy planets
3 gains resources by 'converting' population into more beasts, possibly can do the same thing with organics
4 uses organic technology
5 moves slowly, spreads slowly - for this to work it needs to be a creeping death style of thing
6 basic cloaking abilities apply to the swarm
7 needs a swarm mother ie some kind of superbaseship able to create more little rampaging darlings
8 needs to be tip top at ground combat

Would this be hard to mod?

[Suicide Junkie]

1: Everything you can possibly do politically (even nothing?) increases their anger towards you. No prob.
2: AIs naturally expand. They won't focus on adding territory, since they will attack any ships they see, but you don't want them expanding too fast.
3: Not gonna happen. Unfortunately, the soylent green facilities were tried and failed. They're gonna be building Farms on their invisible planets just like everybody else.
4: Super-organic tech. Organic + P&N "Living ships" at the very least. Add organic engines and electronics, and you'll be set.
5: Make swarm spores (colony ships) have a max of zero engines, with a built-in 1 standard movement point. They cannot be disabled .
6: Add it to the hulls. They should be very vulnerable to psychic sensors, but average against Grav & temporal, and strong against EM.
7: I don't think AIs handle mobile constrution ships very well. I could be wrong though. They can always use their planet-based hives to produce ships.
8: Not a problem. Dogscoff and his Space vikings should be able to give some pointers.

[Growltigga]

SJ - sounds like you have the answer for pretty much everything. Pity about the consuming ability not being a doer - my thought was that rather than glass planets, the swarm scoffs the populace and converts it into organic points or whatever

I have not downloaded the P&N mod or indeed any mod yet until I get the hang of it more