FreeOrion

Good point.

Then we can build biomes with vegetable life forms. Fauna could "see" the vegetables and tend to move towards them. "Clearing" the vegetables would then make you somewhat safe from fauna -- or, simply settling in areas where there isn't significant vegetables.

The level of danger an area would have could be described by the type of vegetables.

Regarding Krill:

I think "Hives" might be a good concept for Krill. That is, instead of populating the galaxy with small krill swarms, the galaxy could be populated with Krill Hives which have something like a 3% chance of spawning a small Krill Swarm, and remain stationary for the whole game.

Also, we could have a planetary special that on the first turn, turns a planet into a Huge Mineral Rich Gaian planet and creates a powerful stationary space monster, similar to MoO2's space monsters.

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More thoughts:

Asteroids can have Solar Forests. Gas Giants can have Spore Colonies. (Traditional) Planets can have Star Fungus. These are called "ecologies".

All of these are "hives", in that they spawn mobile space critters. Clearing one of these hives out takes a significant amount of time or technology.

3 kinds of mobile critter for each of the above biomes.

Seeds are a kind of critter that travels to nearby systems and grows a new biome there. Seeds travel mostly randomly. Some seeds risk "infecting" a colony or outpost, which can be harmful. Some kind of seeds might attack ships.

Herbivores have a vision range, and tend to move into areas where there are more of the same biome when they move. The largest Herbivores are not very aggressive, but dangerous if attacked. Herbivores tend to flee their predators.

Carnivores also have a vision range. They tend to follow Herbivores, but are more likely to move randomly than Herbivores, and are most likely to attack ships.

The ecology produces a biome -- an environment that sustains and attracts -- for herbivores. Herbivores produce the biome for carnivores.

So if you see lots of a particular ecology, you will expect the corresponding herbivore. If you spot the corresponding herbivore, you expect the carnivore. And if you see the carnivore, you run! Clearing out a given ecology keeps herbivores away. Clearing out the herbivores keeps the carnivores away.

All of this is an attempt to reduce the amount that these are "random events", as in "a space monster wandered over your homeworld. Too bad, so sad." with nothing you could do about it.

BigJoe, Geoff, is that easily do-able?


I agree that could be a problem. In my monster write-ups i've tried to deal with it by making the powerful monsters not move around much, or not stay in one place for long. If the Dread Bandersnatch has the power to destroy an early to mid-game homeworld, but generally keeps on moving before completing the destruction, he's really no worse than a medium level monster you can reliably defeat -- and he's a lot more exciting.


That would make Krill functionally very similar to the Abandoned Drone Factory: weak enemy generated from a stationary factory/hive.


Is our Gaian special actually used? I can't recall finding one in several years of testing.
Other means to the same end: the high-level, really valuable specials have an X% chance of generating a "guardian" or "sentinel" monster. Though it would really rot if you were on the tip of an arm and the only way to the rest of the galaxy was through the Guardian.

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Moster movement is done with an effect (defined as part of their body, which is internally a hull type), which uses a condition to select the destination. Conditions can by arbitrarily complex, and distance or starlane jumps tests can be used.

Current monsters use something similar to this to move:
The relevant condition for selecting where to move is the one after destination =. This condition can include anything from this list, assuming it's been updated recently and correctly. In this case, it selects systems that are starlane-adjacent to the monster's current system (within 1 jump away, but not the system that currently contains the monster).

However, doing a lot of WithinStarlaneJumps tests with large jumps limits, or doing many WithinDistance not after other very restrictive conditions, is generally not a good idea because it can slow down turn processing significantly.

Note also that monster movement could be made dependent on the locations of player-controlled or non-player-controlled buildings or ships, or what focus a planet is using, or star type, or the monster's health. Other things could also be made usable on request, such as monster age in turns.

Not by the engine. It can be added by effects, or could be moved from specials.txt into planet_specials.txt if it was desired to randomly appear on planets.

Can someone please provide example script for converting monster X into monster Y?


Perhaps you collect X minerals or more dubiously X science points for killing a monster.

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That should do the trick, though I didn't actually test it. It's possible that you'll have to put the Destroy effect in a different effectsgroup, but this should work. Also, I don't really know how ship's species are handled for space monsters. This is under the assumption that creating a new space monster works the same way as creating a ship, so Geoff can correct me if that's a bad assumption. I guess space monsters that you don't want to appear at the start of the game should go into premade_ship_designs.txt.

If we could attach an effects group to killing a monster, then we could use "GiveTechToOwner" to unlock a prerequisite for a series of techs related to that space monster. Perhaps each time a space monster of a particular type is killed, a new theory is unlocked that gives the player access to more powerful weapons/ship systems themed around that space monster.

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Species on a space monster won't do anything unless the species has an effect that works on ships. I suspect that using Source.Species might fail if the source has no valid species, because CreateShip probably assumes there is a valid species and may abort if one isn't provided. So, just specify a species name as a string constant, not a Source reference. I'll need to tweak the CreateShip effect to better handle monsters and not require a species to be specified...

It should, although there might also be a problem with creating a ship with no owner that I'll need to fix...

If you do that, then they won't be considered space monsters. The consequence of that is mostly that they will have the wrong icon on the map, and may appear in the wrong place in the encyclopedia.

Edit: In SVN there's now a variant of CreateShip available where just the design name needs to be specified, which will create the ship with no owner and no species, which is suitable for monsters. I've tested it by making a species spawn krill every turn, and it seems to work. /Edit

OK, so how can space monsters that should be present at the start of the game be distinguished from those that should appear only later on? Probably just a flag in the space monster's description, specifying whether or not it should spawn at the start of the game would be appropriate.

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A more useful solution would probably be to have a condition for determining where and when monsters should spawn. This would be tested on all objects every turn, and used to decide where and when to create monsters - not just at the start of the game. I'm not sure where best to put such a condition though...

In general, I think objects that are going to be spawning space monsters in the middle of the game can have their own effects groups to deal with that. A location condition in the monster's description should be adequate for determining where it spawns at the start of the game.

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I don't know how easy this is, but i'd like to see a tag to make certain types of monsters rarer at universe generation, and/or to prevent it from being placed more than once.

A similar/identical function would be nice for species and specials too.

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Those wouldn't be especially difficult.

I'm wondering if something like starting_fleets.txt would be a better method for both though...

There would be a starting_monster_fleets.txt which would contain lists of monster types that would spawn together (or could be a list of one monster type), and would have a location condition and some sort of frequency setting. This would be convenient for me as there wouldn't be any need to change the definition of monsters - which are currently just a ship design - to also have extra fields that aren't used in some cases.

There would also be a starting_neutral_planets.txt which would contain a species, perhaps a list of buildings, and a frequency setting.

What would really be nice, though, would be an interface for Python scripting universe generation, which might be less useful for non-programmers, but would allow completely arbitrary galaxy setups to be scripted.

That does rather sound more useful. Something like this?


And an EP and starting focus would be nice as well.

Could such a thing eventually be used to create custom galaxies for campaign scenarios?

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Maybe. I'm not sure that the Random probability condition is so easy to interpret though, as there is also the galaxy setup setting for life frequency that will have some influence.

Presumably, yes... you could make a script that exactly specifies everything in the universe. For a scenario though, I'd expect that a saved game would be easier. The idea of a universe creation script is to be an alternative random map generator.