Raging monsters!

[madblunted]

Playing 0.4.3.7064, before that 6281, so a significant difference. Wow things are really looking good!
Ok so I'm playing my first game on the new build, 150 stars all default settings (did not change monsters from medium) I have noticed (perhaps it's just this particular map) that there has been about 7 or 8 ruins discovered (I got one.. And save scummed the death ray)
That seems a little excessive? But then I did notice that the rewards are cranked down and not as powerful as before (first ruins was the AI at around turn 25-30 for a dragontooth... Meanwhile I'm still rockin Mark-I's... Still have not seen the dragontooth (or the 3 others I have seen rewarded)

So forget all that.

Turn 271. In the purple AI's corner there is god damn a billion monsters. Big ass ones too.
In a space about 200uu there is (that I can see, the edge systems are still "?")
11 black krackens and 7 bloated juggernauts. This has basically ruined the game.. The green AI isn't being affected really and I can't do shit about a mob with 7k health... I didn't focus on ship tech at all yet...

So is this normal? And damn what if someone put "monsters frequency" on "high"?! Crazy...
Maybe I just got a bad universe seed... Sorry using my phone and can't upload a saved game.

Cheers

[Geoff the Medio]

Black Krakens and Bloated Juggernauts are a bit of a special case; they are spawned by the Experimentor Outpost building after about turn 200, about every 5 to 10 turns, independent of the game's monsters setting during setup.

[madblunted]

Just got omniscanner... Holy hell. I should walk over to the free wifi and upload this... Turn 286 and game has stopped... No one has ships left. There's FLEETS of friggin juggernauts! I mean no shit there's probably 50 on my screen.



Edit:

Just did super user take over... Oh my god... Gonna walk to the wifi an upload this. It's insane....

[madblunted]

all i can say is... load the save game and turn on super-user takeover.



(won't let me upload just the .sav file, its >5mb)

[Geoff the Medio]

I can't open an "ace" file... Try .zip or .rar

[madblunted]

Hmm. Well I already walked home. Someone else repost it as a zip? Just had some stupid shareware winace on here... Winzip ya gotta warez it right? Been decades... Oh well. If no one reposts it I'll figure somethin out tomorrow.

[Geoff the Medio]

Winzip ya gotta warez it right?

There are no-cost alternatives, such as 7-zip.

[MatGB]

I remember the first time I encountered Experimentors. I died, for many many turns. Then I built a better quality of ships, fleeted them up big time, and went on a mission to take the outpost, which I did. The rest was mopping up, which took effort.

Learning to prepare for the late-game challenges of things like Experimentors is part of the challenge of the game; I do wonder if, at some point, we ought to list victory conditions and allow players to select whether they appear or not—we also need to get the Sitrep victory reappearing somehow, should be possible with the building in some way.

Madblunted, yeah, they're scary, but they are defeatable, each monster type seeks a different thing to attack, buildings, ships, populated planets. You need powerful ships (Fractal Hulls, Ravenous hulls, Nanobot and Titan hulls or lots of heavy asteroid hulls) well armoured and equipped with death rays.

Also, as a learning thing, you need Sensors by turn 200, minimum, and ieally omni scanner as well, and you really need to be getting access to better ships in the early game quicker, mark 1s are somethign I try to avoid building, ever, they're terrible. Organic hulls are cheap and easy.

[madblunted]

Here is the zip file. It's worth taking a look... run the super-user takeover when you load it up.

[MatGB]

This is the first time you've seen them, so you're sure it's an amazing site. It's something experienced players know about, and expect. Plus, savegame compatibility isn't that backward compatible, in order to load your savegame I'd need to know a) what OS you're using as they're not compatible across OSs and b) what version of the game you're using, I have the most recent test installed and can install slightly earlier versions, but reinstalling the basic game just isn't something I want to do to just see something I've seen before.

Experimentors are limited, but normally spawn. If you have any monsters in your choice, and there's enough space for them to spawn at least 5 jumps from a capital planet on turn one, they'll take over a system, shut down all the starlanes so you can't see it, and hide the planet so you need an omni scanner to even know they're there.

After turn 200 they'll, slowly, start creating fleets of increasingly scary monsters (Cosmic Dragons are scarier than what you've seen, trust me on this).

If you want the challenge to try to defeat them, then you need to go for the quickest to get to of either heavy asteroid or fractal hulls and build big fleets—it's probably worth destroying most of your existing fleet once you're ready tos tart building.

Alternatively, learn from the experience, you need decent ship tech by turn 200. On the other hand, the best way to get that is to get decent population and research output before turn 200.

They're a challenge, but they only appear in the late game. Next game you play, you'll know you need to be ready for them.

[madblunted]

If I wanted to play a game designed by a bunch of elitist pricks I'd be playing Ufo:AI.
The last few years of playing this game off and on have been enjoyable and I have watched this project grow and the few posts I have made have legitimate.

That being said, MattGB you sir are an ass.
The version is stated on the first post.
I wasted 300 turns on a going well game because someone wanted to put some monster factory in the game (which I still insist is broken in my particular case)

If however, you look at the save and say, "Yes! There is supposed to be 5000 fucking monsters on the map!" Then I would respectfully suggest that there is an option to disable the factory, or at least have a toggle-able difficulty level associated with it.

[Dilvish]

If I wanted to play a game designed by a bunch of elitist pricks I'd be playing Ufo:AI....The version is stated on the first post.

When I look over the posts here I see folks trying to be helpful, at worst I see what could perhaps be interpreted as a slightly patronizing tone someplace, but still embedded in helpful advice. If that's your standard for calling people elitist pricks etc., then it's pretty tempting to just wish you do indeed simply switch to playing Ufo:AI. Perhaps though you can step back a minute, take a deep breath or two, and reconsider that previous response. This is intended to be helpful, as is the advice below; I hope I don't come to regret this.

I wasted 300 turns on a going well game because someone wanted to put some monster factory in the game (which I still insist is broken in my particular case) If however, you look at the save and say, "Yes! There is supposed to be 5000 fucking monsters on the map!" Then I would respectfully suggest that there is an option to disable the factory, or at least have a toggle-able difficulty level associated with it.

Sorry to hear you feel you wasted 300 turns there. Just so you know, that experimentor outpost was added quite some time back to give this very-much-still-in-development game a kind of endpoint victory condition to shoot for; some kind of better victory wrapup is still much needed by the game. In my experience the experimentor mobs tend to spread out kind of slowly, so you might still be able to research up and clear your current map. Alternatively, you can mostly or perhaps even entirely solve your problem by editing your content. Also, for those of us not currently set up on Windows, or who otherwise just don't want to fiddle with trying to load the save file, if you want to show how bad the situation was you could post a screenshot (though I understand that can't really show the full scope of the issue).

I'm not certain of the location of the default content directory in Windows, though I suspect that in all OS's it's in a subfolder entitled 'default', located within the FO install directory. If that turns out to be in a protected area in your Windows setup, then you should still be able to copy the entire 'default' folder into some other location that you have edit rights for, and then adjust your FO options settings to point to that new content location (that's also how you could check what the current location is).

As for the specific edits to make (I suggest first making a backup copy of any files you'll edit, and you may need an editor better than whats in Windows by default, Notepad++ should be enough), the main thing it sounds like you'd want to do is disable the initially spawning experimentor outpost from your content -- go into space_monster_spawn_fleets.txt and look for the entry for SM_EXP_OUTPOST and set the spawnrate to 0.0 (zero); I think that should do it. For your current game, if you go into space_monsters.txt and go to the entries at the end (SM_BLACK_KRAKEN and onwards) and just delete some or all of the weapons from the partslists there, then you could make those monsters easily manageable.

[Kaezar]

I have been having a fair deal of trouble with the experimenter outpost as well. It can be deal with, but you have to go all out on military research and start building ships asap to do it. If/when the experimener appears, the game becomes more a monster killer instead of a 4x game.

Giving a look at the Experimenter Outpost code

EffectsGroup
scope = Source
activation = And [
Turn low = 200 high = 235
Random 0.2
]
effects = [
CreateShip "SM_BLACK_KRAKEN" Source.Owner
CreateShip "SM_BLACK_KRAKEN" Source.Owner
CreateShip "SM_BLACK_KRAKEN" Source.Owner
CreateShip "SM_BLACK_KRAKEN" Source.Owner
CreateShip "SM_BLACK_KRAKEN" Source.Owner
]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the code below means that there is a 20% chance each round of the outpost dropping the 5 critter bundle. If that is right there is a virtual certainty of it dropping the bundle before turn 215 (do the math). More, unless those events are only happening once, you'll probable end up with 5 to 7 bundles running around between turn 200 and 235. And from there it gets worse.

Now I have nothing against making the game hard, in fact I approve. But making it so the only way to win is to follow a pre-determined research/expansion path is bad design imo. Because in fact you pretty much have to follow a certain way (go all out on weapon/shield/asteroid research search for a system with asteroids to colonize, then go sensors) on pretty much every game. Because if you don't and the EO appears, the game is over.

Take care

[MatGB]

There's definitely a distinct playstyle issue to this discussion—I don't go all out on miltech, I go all out on growth/research tech.

That then gives me much faster access to miltech in the mid to late game, and in a LOT of the games I play I've completely conquered the rest of the map and have built top of the range fleets way before turn 200, in fact my current search is for generic game settings that give me an actual challenge so that, by the time they start spawning, I'm not just setup with big fleets surrounding their outpost ready to destroy it.

Also, I rarely if ever use Asteroid line hulls, they don't suit my playstyle, Ravenous Hulls or Energy line hulls (especially Fractals) are much more fun to use, although I tend to avoid Fractals these days as I believe they're ridiculously overpowered and make victory far too easy. By turn 220ish if I'm not researching Transcendance with virtually everything else done I tend to feel something's gone wrong and I must've had a really bad start.

So yeah, by turn 220 there'll be a chunk of Black Kraken wondering around, but nothing that a decent sized fleet can't handle. At least, nothing one of my fleets can't handle. And I'm very aware saying this it appears arrogant, but in order to have the conversation we have to be honest where we're coming from, to a very experienced player these guys are easy to defeat, but they are a victory condition, they shouldn't be too easy.

Question for more experienced script writers: given the galaxy generation settings are findable through the interface, can it be considered in a script? ie, if the player is on "beginner" mode the Experimentors should start later and release fewer ships, but if on Maniacal the current setup is possibly even a bit easy?

(I am working on some scripts that make things clearer and warn players, and it's worth considering toning down how fast they release in the early stages, but I'm very wary of doing too much there myself as, for above stated reasons, I'm really the wrong person to test if they're toned down to the right level, I'm considering scripting them to be harder for my personal install).

[Kaezar]

Just for curiosity's sake, how many stars do you tipically play on your map? Leat I have played long was 400. Just stopped a game and stopped after about 450 turns because game was won.

Game before that had 1000 stars and I won by research.

Take care