Scan for a Beast

This is a suggestion for a new aspect to the game, similar to the way that legion missions added an exciting, unique element that many were hoping for. Note: The specific amounts of materials (EM/CTP/badges etc) and NPC specifics are just suggestions. I haven’t weighed them for balance and I feel like they are things that can be debated in the topic, and ultimately decided upon by the devs.

On the Battle Tab, next to Scan for base an addition:

Scan for a Beast (ungray requirements include a minimum of 15 legion members and legion loyalty)


Costs: 2 blue badges
Who can scan: set by legion leaders as either Leaders only, Officers and Leaders, or All Legion Members. Members must be loyal.

Scanning for a beast is similar to scanning for planets. There would be a large potential for undesirable scans. The % are not important, and I would leave that to Dan to figure out. But these would be the options:

Common scan: Space Debris, continue scanning.
Uncommon scan: Non-Sentient beast
Rare scan: Sentient Beasts

Space Debris cannot be locked, it is merely rock and ice that the scanners picked up with microscopic single celled organisms on them.

Non-Sentient beasts are lockable. Types of Non-Sentient beasts:

Torrowae- Space serpent with chameleonesque interlocking scales that are coveted by warring beings for their superior durability and illusionary nature and used as hull modifications for ships. Has a health of 1,000.

If you lock a Torrowae: Your legion must keep the Torrowae alive for 3 days. It requires regular feedings every 8 hours of 1200 EM from a scaled # of legion members. (5-10% of the loyal legion members) After a Successful feeding, there will be a timer until the next feeding time. Once that timer expires, the feeding timer of 8hrs will begin, during which the legion members must feed the beast. The mechanic will be similar to the base timer.

In addition, 15 Exotic Hollowfields must be fed to the Torrowae every 24 hours. Which drop from a beast specfic NPC which will spawn on individual legion members NPC Battle Tab as an uncommon NPC.

Torrowae specific enemy NPCs- The Grundys: savage warring aliens that are famous for salvaging wrecker ships and remodding them with Torrowae scale armor.
NPC type: Uncommon
Shields/Hull/Attack/Defense scaled based on player rank.
The Grundys drop an Exotic Hollowfield.

How a Torrowae dies: If 1 person misses a feeding, the Torrowae loses 100 health. If The 15 Exotic Hollowfields are not fed to the Torrowae 100 damage is taken by the Torrowae for each missing Exotic Hollowfield.

If you keep a Torrowae alive: The Torrowae rewards the legion for protecting it in enemy territory with an artifact.

Artifact: Torrowae Scales: provides an 8% cloak boost for 8hrs. immune to being removed.
Rewards are only given to legion members who have contributed to the survival of the beast.

Other ideas for non-sentient beasts: A beast that feeds on cloning pods, and rewards a +2 research, +1 artifact planet building with a % boost for population. A beast that feeds on Kurenite and rewards an upgradeable ship module that boosts cloak and energy.

I can go on for days with ideas, and suggestions are always appreciated.

Types of Sentient Beasts

Autonomiana Ingobarx -- a complex hybrid creature that is part wooly beast, part highly advanced artificial intelligence. The Ingobarx created the Autonomiana as a companion artificial intelligence. After many generations of close research and work, the creator and creation slowly merged into their current symbiotic form. Incredibly smart, if prone to tangential thought, they travel from universe to universe, studying alien life forms and imparting their knowledge. Their AI blood-oil is highly valued on the black market for illegal experiments.

If you scan a Autonomiana Ingobarx: Your legion must keep the AI alive for 5 days. It requires feeding every 8 hours of 500 ctp from a scaled # of legion members. (5-10% of the loyal legion members). Has a health of 10,000

Every 12 hours a NPC Boss appears.

AI specific NPC Boss: The Slevorasks. Dark scientists intent on draining AIs of their hybrid blood-oil to use in arcane scientific experiments.

A minimum # of members must hit the NPC based on a percent # of legion members.
12 hour boss
Boss strengths are scaled based on legion average strength.
Ability: Chance of electro blood storms: breaks 1 ship weapon at random.
Reward: upon disable there is a chance The Slevorasks will drop a Dark Market Bot which provides +8 Rank Points.

How an Autonomiana Ingobarx dies: For each missed feeding of CTP, 500 health is dropped by the AI. Failure to disable a Slevorask Boss results in a loss of 5,000 health.

If you keep an Autonomiana Ingobarx alive: the AI thanks you and drops a Blood-Oil planetary building. Size 1: Artifact 2, Cloak 20%. Rewards are only given to legion members who have contributed to the survival of the beast.

other Sentient Beast ideas: A beast that feeds on ship-bots (give them a use!) with beast-specfic NPCs that drop bundles of dark badges (perhaps 10 at a time).


Thoughts, tweaks, suggestions, discussion....GO!

(minor edits for clarification)

+1 just b/c its Thrace

Let's do it!

Requires teamwork, could be a lot of fun... and we need monsters! Would love to see something like this implemented!

I think there should be a beast that spawn some part of itself (tentacles or something) on legion members battle tabs. They would expire when the beast expired, so if they weren't culled/remoded they would clog that member's battle tab (say 4 tentacles a day per legion member). Some amount of tentacles would need to be culled during the event while still feeding/protecting the beast otherwise in order to succeed.

Yep, a very interesting idea, like the teamwork and also the sacrifice of blues

Once Bainar is maxed, Blues will need a purpose again since the planet structure is pretty meh.

I really wanna feed a beast and hopefully now that I am a few years older it won't just die like my tamagotchi pet did every week :'(


I don't know that this would be a good idea.

Popular example is Namalak and his Imperium.
Legions like that would have a warped average strength because Namalak's ship is so much stronger than everyone else. This would basically make the beast too strong for everyone except Namalak to hurt.

Even in EotS we have a handful of extremes where a few ships have attacks over 100k pulling the average up a bit. New members with only 30k attack are gonna be left not able to help much on.

Also, the must lock thing doesn't sound like fun.
If we wanna spend more blues looking for a specific beast we should be able to.

Yeah, i see that there are problems inherent in the scaling based on average strength. But I am also a bit stumped as to how to make the Beasts difficult for everyone, but not so hard that they aren't worth even scanning for. *shrug* There's got to be some way.

Made a few changes to the original post for clarification. In scanning for a Beast it is much the same way as scanning for a Base: you keep going until you find the one you want. (or run out of Blues )

There should be varying levels of beasts, say 1 through 5??
The top legions won't wanna lock the easy level 1 beasts and the lower legions shouldn't be locking the toughest beasts out there.

Have the scan chances vary based on the base level.
Basically a similar weighted drop rate as is done with mineral pulls.
A level 8 base has a higher chance to scan level 5 beasts than someone in a level 3 base.

So a level 5 beast should be on par with the difficulty of killing a level 7 base.
The boss that comes to kill it can have a few million hull/shield and around 100k defense (defense needs to be higher than bases because NPC attack is higher than base attack)

While a level 1 beast is about as hard as a level 3 base.

Sorry if i'm missing something here, but as far as i can tell, this wont really gives blue badges a big use.
If it takes 2 blue badges per scanning, even with a fairly low chance of finding something, say 10%, and having to keep each beast alive for 3 days or more, thats not a whole lot of blues.
In fact, if you do the math, you'll see its only 20 blues (from one player per legion) every 3-5 days.

Of course, i understand that these numbers are just suggestions.
I'd recommend increasing cost and/or decreasing duration.
Of course you only mentioned a couple of different ones, you may well have planned for some that expire faster, thus actually burning up blues faster.

All in all, i'm gonna give it a -1 for now, although i'm not entirely sure why. It just doesnt seem right to me.
Though its a well thought-out idea, and you've clearly put a lot of thought into it.

Maybe if it was scaled to the members in the middle of the legion

Scaling to the middle strength members would mean removing the outliers in the legion.

Still might now work with legions that are ~10 good ships and then a bunch of low ranks.

Of course this could just be a reason for ships to spread out and brake away from super legions.
Depends on what Dan wants.

What about it scaling per person? Each person in the legion would see it at stats based on their strength.

Scaling per player ehhh.

If you want low ranks being able to tackle the hardest beasts then sure.

I prefer a goal you can visibly work towards like when you see warp stations for the first time they are hard.
They are a fixed goal you can overcome.

Also you don't see any other shared elites that are scaled to the individuals so I don't see it as a likely possibility.

The suggestion for the amount of blues is just a suggestion- as I said earlier, the numbers haven't been weighed for fairness and scale. I can write more suggestions for more beasts- I have plenty of ideas, but I didn't want to bog down the main post with too much information, or else people wouldn't read it to begin with.



I agree with Tree- this is supposed to be hard, but no so hard that it is impossible. I definitely don't think it should be easy though, the rewards have the potential to be awesome so it should stay difficult, fresh, a challenge. The idea is to stimulate content and regular play, especially for the higher rankers who have basically finished all the content and are slowly turning into collectors. The game itself seems to have fewer rewards the higher you rank, so supplementing the losses with new content feels like a necessary step in order to keep the current fan base. Of course, players retiring from an MMO is pretty standard, but in the case of GL there is still a lot of room for growing and expansion.

Scaling per player doesn't mean it has to be easy, just scaled to a point that it is hard for everyone. I do agree that it is unlikely though, as it hasn't been done for anything else. Was just an idea.

Could have the Scannable Beasts time scaled back like the base scanning. 1 every 8 hrs. works for bases it would work for the Giant Space monsters too. Could make it like a Captain Nemo thing, where the Space monster attacks your Legion base, and you must stop the critter before your base is disabled. Critter strength is based on your legions base level.

Otherwise, nice input and ideas. +1