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Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 1:03 pm
by Sloth
There are some inconsistencies in the description and scripts of the Black Kraken, Bloated Juggernauts and Psionic Snowflakes:

1. Part of the description of Black Kraken:

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They seek out and attack populated planets, [[encyclopedia ORGANIC_SPECIES_TITLE]] inhabitants are particularly vulnerable to their attacks.
Organic species being vulnerable is history since BigJoe removed the condition from Bio-Terminator here: https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/pull/98

Part of the description of Bloated Juggernauts:

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They seek out and attack planetary buildings, [[encyclopedia ORGANIC_SPECIES_TITLE]] inhabitants are particularly vulnerable to their attacks.
Planetary buildings? Is this some kind of unfinished business? They have Bio-Terminators just like the Black Kraken.

For 0.4.5 i propose the sentence: "They seek out and attack populated planets." for both of them.

Sidenote: Psionic Snowflakes also have Bio-Terminators, but don't mention them in their description and they don't hunt planets (they hunt ships).

2. All the Juggernauts from small to large have shields, but the Bloated Juggernaut does not (none of the Experimentor monsters have shields). For the sake of consistency i propose to give them least the same shield as the Large Juggernaut and reduce their damage from 120 to 90 (they will still be the monsters with the highest damage in the game).

What do you think?

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 2:29 pm
by MatGB
I added the line about organic vulnerability awhileback when I was trying to improve the info available to newish players getting slaughtered by them, it definitely needs to go now, agreed.

Regarding what they seek out, I again added both lines, because they are in fact both scripted to seek out specific targets, there are some macros somewhere with the parameters, have a look see if they're still relevent.

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2015 3:13 pm
by Dilvish
Sloth wrote:Part of the description of Bloated Juggernauts:

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They seek out and attack planetary buildings, [[encyclopedia ORGANIC_SPECIES_TITLE]] inhabitants are particularly vulnerable to their attacks.
Planetary buildings? Is this some kind of unfinished business? They have Bio-Terminators just like the Black Kraken.
The reference to buildings is because unlike some of the other monsters, Bloated Juggernauts do not make a totally random destination selection when moving-- they will preferentially move to a system that has buildings. So, the statement seems accurate to me as it is, though perhaps you want to add something to help clarify.

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 5:19 am
by Bigjoe5
The description is a bit misleading, since they don't actually do anything to the buildings as far as I know, but they will move towards an empire owned building if they see one. Black Krakens seem to have the same property, based on the scripts.

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 11:51 am
by Sloth
I've created a PR that fixes these issues.

New text for Black Kraken and Bloated Juggernaut:

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They seek out planets with visible buildings and attack their population.
New text for Psionic Snowflake:

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They are also able to directly attack the population of planets.
Funtional change for Bloated Juggernaut: Replaced a Death Ray 4 with a Plasma Shield.

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 12:37 pm
by MatGB
Cool, I was getting the different macros mixed up in my memory, it's the Dragons that have the simple "hunt planets" one, the Kraken and the Jugger are the same. We might want to look at changing that so they move on if they've killed all the population in the system though at some point.

https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/ ... d919e34a16

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 12:57 pm
by Sloth
MatGB wrote:Cool, I was getting the different macros mixed up in my memory, it's the Dragons that have the simple "hunt planets" one, the Kraken and the Jugger are the same. We might want to look at changing that so they move on if they've killed all the population in the system though at some point.
Maybe we should add a "Population low = 0.1" condition to the scope?

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 5:11 pm
by MatGB
My brain is telling me there's a problem with that idea, but won't tell me what that problem is, I think something to do with the way death spores sometimes appear to have wiped a system out then there's a tiny residual recovery. Which isn't, necessarily, a bad thing, of course.

Test it? I don't have a savegame on the new machine where the big beasties are close to appearing at the moment.

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 6:36 pm
by Dilvish
Sloth wrote:Maybe we should add a "Population low = 0.1" condition to the scope?
Partly due to the concern Mat just raised about residual populations, I'd suggest simply "Species" rather than a numeric population floor. If a population is at 0.02 regrowth is so slow that I'd normally prefer it just get finished off so I can restart it (evacuations are blocked when the pop is that low).

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2015 8:43 pm
by Sloth
Dilvish wrote:
Sloth wrote:Maybe we should add a "Population low = 0.1" condition to the scope?
Partly due to the concern Mat just raised about residual populations, I'd suggest simply "Species" rather than a numeric population floor. If a population is at 0.02 regrowth is so slow that I'd normally prefer it just get finished off so I can restart it (evacuations are blocked when the pop is that low).
I made a PR that adds a species condition: https://github.com/freeorion/freeorion/pull/127

Note: I moved the "WithinDistance distance" condition to the bottom for performance reasons (don't check distance for every building, just once per system).

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2015 1:32 am
by Bigjoe5
Dilvish wrote:(evacuations are blocked when the pop is that low)
Any reason for that? Why not replace "TargetPopulation low = 1" with "Species" in the location condition for the Evacuation building?

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2015 3:15 am
by Dilvish
Bigjoe5 wrote:
Dilvish wrote:(evacuations are blocked when the pop is that low)
Any reason for that? Why not replace "TargetPopulation low = 1" with "Species" in the location condition for the Evacuation building?
I think the idea was to prevent you from gaining pop on another planet that you didn't have at the local planet to begin with, but I don't find it very compelling. Sounds like you are of the same opinion, and yes, I am totally game to just change that to a 'Species' clause. Any objections?

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2015 1:41 pm
by MatGB
Rarely if ever use evacuations, so no opinion either way, go for it.

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2015 7:19 pm
by Dilvish
ok, change to evacuation is done.

Re: Bloated Juggernauts and friends

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 8:37 am
by Vezzra
Sloth wrote:Funtional change for Bloated Juggernaut: Replaced a Death Ray 4 with a Plasma Shield.
Can we confirm that this really works? You swapped an external part (weapon) for an internal one (shield), in theory that should cause an error...