Space Monsters

Nicholas_Bostaph · Posted: Fri Nov 12, 2010 11:12 pm Post subject: Space Monsters

I'm going to be starting up a PBW game of this sometime soon, and was hoping to possibly include space monsters. I was hoping someone could answer a few questions for me about them:

1) Do they act like a normal empire, or can they be more like the random monsters in MoO2?

2) How do I include monsters without including any other AI empires?

Thanks,
Nicholas

Fyron · Galactic Guru Joined: Aug 04, 2003 Location: CA, USA

Monsters are an empire like any other, except that they cannot expand beyond their homeworld (which is permanently cloaked). They have no access to colony ships or troops, and IIRC only ever perform super-strength defensive intel projects. Their ships have negative maintenance costs, so they are never constrained by resources, just the build rate of the several BSYs they build over the HW. They research some monster techs to delay the onset of larger and scarier forms.

If you want only a monster empire, you will need to remove all the shipsets that are not used by a player in the game (and the Monsters folder, natch!) from the Races folder. Then, modify Settings.txt to add a minimum and maximum of 1 AI race for each setting (low/med/high). Next, set up the game by loading player empires as normal. When you hit start, the game should add just 1 AI empire. Since there is now only 1 available race folder, it will have to chose the monsters.

Make sure to open the game as host and look at the player list before uploading to PBW, just to make sure everything worked out.

Once your savegame is created, you should put the other shipset folders back into the Races folder to prevent interference with other games.

Nicholas_Bostaph · Posted: Fri Nov 19, 2010 4:52 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the in-depth response. Assuming it's good with the other players, we'll definitely give this a try. Smile

Alikiwi · Space Emperor Joined: May 09, 2007 Location: Tasmania

You shouldn't need to go to all that trouble. You can set up the game with NO AI players, then add all the human players, then add the Monster race manually. All you should need to do then is 'edit' the Monster race and change it from human to AI. Very Happy

You can test that before submitting it to PBW Wink

Fyron · Galactic Guru Joined: Aug 04, 2003 Location: CA, USA

Doesn't that cause an ai empire to end up using the generic ai files, rather that the ai files in the shipset folder?

Alikiwi · Space Emperor Joined: May 09, 2007 Location: Tasmania

It shouldn't have that effect, it should still access its own folder. I haven't tested that in a long time, might just double check tonight. Plenty of monsters around here Laughing

Black_Knyght · Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2010 5:18 am Post subject:

Hmmmm..., I wonder where those came from? Wink