FreeOrion

Typically, monsters move slowly enough that even with early-game detection, the player should be able to see them before they reach the system. The exceptions to this, which right now are Asteroid Snail and those stealth monsters, either don't move, or don't (i.e. won't) have weapons, so I don't expect it to be difficult to avoid making it into a problem.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

OK, I've made some changes. Eleazar, I'm pretty sure I didn't revert any of the effective changes from your last commit, but it's hard to tell what was actually done, and what was just shuffling techs around, so you might want to double-check.


I'd recommend testing in a 100-200 star galaxy, since if it's much smaller, like ~50 stars, there's a chance that the location condition for the new monster's origin won't be met, and then the game just gets way too easy after turn 100 or so.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

It would have been easier on both of us if you just let the change stand, instead of trying to unshuffling without loosing the new changes. You did indeed preserve the effects changes i committed.


Don't forget the change log, located at the same level as the "default" folder. Stuff that answers a player's question: "what's different from the last version?" can go there.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

Problem was that I had already updated that file, so I couldn't just replace it, and svn update just duplicated the techs rather than moving them, so I just deleted duplicates without regard for which ones were in which order.


Good point.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Not for the sake of those edits, but because we are likely to often be working on the same files in the future, i'd like to probe into this a little more.

I'm not quite clear on what you are describing...
You're not doing your work-in progress in the same folder that's linked to the SVN repository, are you? I do my testing/editing on one copy of FO, and when ready, "svn update", then merge in the changes to the files linked to SVN and commit. It saves headaches.

I can't guess how svn would have duplicated techs in the same file unless you were merging the files and stopped half-way through the file.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

That's a good idea, and I do actually keep an svn copy of the default folder lying around, and copy it to a new folder when I want to make changes, but I didn't really think to switch back to update, then merge my changes, due to some combination of tiredness and absentmindedness.

Probably when svn encountered a conflict and I selected "mine conflict" to make sure nothing I changed would be lost.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

"At last, the mysterious violent threat plagueing the galaxy has been eliminated. The source of the galaxy's peril has been vanquished, and its origins will forever remain a mystery."
I got this message on turn 3 without doing anything. --revision 4782.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

Fixed in svn.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

So i'm testing the game, and thinking that your monster changes don't seem to make any difference. By turn 38 i think i'm doing pretty well-- have some convenient minor species that complement my starter species.
Then a Juggernaut 2 comes along and utterly destroys my fleet of Mark 3s and lesser ships, and eats a colony. It had 400 hit points, so my fleet only slightly scratched it. If it happens to move to the right stars it could easily destroy my entire empire in the next dozen turns.

Those new structure values for monsters seem rather excessive.
Also consider that the player can capture nests producing these things-- a single one should not be so invincible.

Also i didn't see any sit rep message when the Juggernaut ate my colony.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

There are a couple of things you can do about that:

1) Research Laser. I usually arm robotic hulls with Lasers in the early game, so three or four of them can reliably take out a Juggernaut, particularly when defending a system, since there are other things for it to shoot at.

2) Research some stealth techs. Juggernauts aren't very bright, so even a species with no stealth bonus should be able to hide from it by researching Absorption Field (Damper Field should hide you from Small Juggernauts, and Dimensional Cloak should hide you from Large Juggernauts; you'll probably want Phasing Cloak before the Black Krakens show up). Death Spore and Bioterminator only work if the monster's detection is higher than your stealth - also, monsters won't stay around your planets if they can't see them.

I would hope so. If anyone can win on their very first playtest, I'd say I've failed in making the game adequately challenging. For reference, I'm on my fifth playtest, and I think I'm on the verge of actually winning for the first time.

That's true. A good strategy is to capture monster nests and find a strategic defending location to place them that also meets their location requirements for upgrading to a better type of monster. In the long run, I expect that when there are competent imperial opponents, it will be reasonable to make them weaker, but since their sole purpose right now is to provide a challenge, worrying about the player having an excessive advantage over other empires due to having a monster nest isn't yet relevant.

In the very recent past you would get a sitrep message saying "The entire population of XYZ was lost to famine!", but I suppose that doesn't happen anymore. I should probably add a sitrep message effects group to the death spore/bioterminator ship parts.

Edit: Also, I agree that the monsters now are probably a bit too powerful, but more due to the terrifying monsters that the Experimentors send out, rather than the natural monsters that show up.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Don't forget that a starting position in an arm of a spiral is much more defensible than a position in an elliptical galaxy, and there's still the "Many" setting for space monsters for extreme difficulty.


I did see a famine message later-- but still that's the wrong message.

And the spores thing can destroy multiple colonies in the same system at once. "-2" is often the entire colony now, at least in early game. And this is one of your lowest level monsters.


Also small krill show up as "weaponless" monsters even though they can destroy colonies.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

My current game's starting position is on the edge of a core in a three-arm spiral galaxy with "Many" monsters. Actually, I think this position, while less defensible than in an arm, actually ended up being an advantage, since I was able to reach out and take over/colonize several pretty good planets quite early on.

Yeah, monsters do destroy colonies much more quickly since Geoff went and changed all health and farming modifiers to population modifiers. It originally took several turns even for a small outpost to be destroyed by monsters, so I'll need to find a way to make the effect less devastating.

Sounds like the type of Death Spore and Bioterminator weapons should be changed to SR or something else that the game recognizes as a weapon. Ideally though, I'd like to see a "Bomb" type of weapon that they (and other bombs) could be classified as.

_________________
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

Just reducing the size of the effects would probably suffice. I replaced various health modifiers with population modifiers, which I suspect are the relevant effects for the monster attacks. I didn't put much effort into balancing the sizes of these changes though, so they're probably too big if they used to be health modifiers and are now population modifiers.

Edit: If it would be useful, I could add an effect so that monsters could mark a planet as having been attacked on the current turn, without actually needing to go into the combat system and actually have a monster attack the planet (which is currently what's required). The consequence of that is currently just that shields, defense, and troops don't regenerate on the turn after a planet has been attacked. It could be extended to prevent population and resource meter growth as well, though.

Or in the short term, you could just add the minimum standard SR weapon to "weaponless" colony-eating monsters, so they show up as "armed".

For the longer term, a general implementation of bombardment would probably cover the needs of colony-destroying monsters, and deal more properly with complications like shields.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

[snipped from another thread & expanded, I think this is where this goes...]

From a game balance perspective, the problem with the new monsters is that in a small universe, you have some hope of finding and eliminating their nests fairly early (once you realize that the AIs are no longer going to be a threat under the new system). But in a medium universe (I'm typically playing in universes in the 200-300 system range), the monsters are growing and breeding out there, and by the time you even encounter most of them, they are ridiculously powerful. The Black Krakens and Bloated Juggernauts were so sudden and numerous (and fast-moving!) by the time that I encountered them, that I couldn't build ships faster than they came, even though I initially was able to preserve the majority of my empire. I was building 50 Mark VIIIs every turn, and I probably killed 15-20 or so of them (the monsters), but they kept coming & I kept losing all the ships I was building. I'm all for a challenge, and I'm all for new and more powerful monsters but I think they are too sudden, powerful, and numerous presently, at least in a 200-system galaxy, by the time you encounter them.

Also, the new monster regime radically changes what needs to be researched in the first 100 turns. You gotta do Lasers & Sensors (at least!) ASAP. Mark I-IVs are now pretty much obsolete from Turn 1. Not sure that's a desirable thing. I'm thinking you should start the game more or less able to defend yourself against what you are likely to encounter in the first 10-30 turns, otherwise you can't expand like you need to.

I think the monsters should philosophically be an occasional nuisance in the early game, a locally-dangerous encounter in mid-game (turn 75-125 or so), but not really a threat to your empire's existence until maybe turn 200+, and even then, there should be more warning than just wave after wave of monsters that are going to overpower anything you can build.

Other players/AIs should be the primary threat, no? Of course, AIs are kindof dumb at present, but that's going to be fixed, no?

Hopefully, these comments are constructive.