Early-game monsters with Precursor Armor

[Ruldra]

Hello there, started playing FreeOrion recently and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. There's something I'd like to ask though.

I started one game today (ver 0.4.5) and ran into this scenario: http://i.imgur.com/TPbVcug.png

The only way out of this corner of the map is blocked by 2 monsters equipped with Plasma Cannon 4 and a grand total of 1600 structure points. Game over right there.

Screencapped that and started another game. Now I ran into this: http://i.imgur.com/OmOXOCp.png

Aside from the monster at Nidor B, all the others are Maintenance Ships with Precursor Armor. I don't mind random monsters but that armor makes it impossible to kill them until way into the mid-late game. Right now they're essentially huge roadblocks.

Is this intentional? Because they ruin the early-game phase. I'd suggest for these particular monsters to not appear until much later, when you can realistically deal with them.

Monster frequency is set to low, by the way.

[Vezzra]

I started one game today (ver 0.4.5) and ran into this scenario: http://i.imgur.com/TPbVcug.png

The only way out of this corner of the map is blocked by 2 monsters equipped with Plasma Cannon 4 and a grand total of 1600 structure points. Game over right there.

Ouch, that's really bad luck indeed. Unfortunately we have no code in place yet that prevents such things, but that's certainly something we need to address at some point.

Aside from the monster at Nidor B, all the others are Maintenance Ships with Precursor Armor. I don't mind random monsters but that armor makes it impossible to kill them until way into the mid-late game. Right now they're essentially huge roadblocks.

Actually, you can get past Maintenance Ships quite easily, as they only block you for a turn. Your ships just need to be sturdy enough to survive this one turn of combat against the Maintenance Ship, which is possible even with early game ships given the extremely low firepower of the Maintenance Ship. They are more of an annoyance than an actual threat. An annoyance that you can't get rid of easily because of their high structure, which is, to answer your question, intentional.

I'd suggest for these particular monsters to not appear until much later, when you can realistically deal with them.

Maintenance Ships, Sentries and Sentinels are placed during universe generation, so they can't appear later, they are in place right from the start of the game. And the purpose of those nasty Sentinels (which are the ones from your first example, far more dangerous than the Sentinels and the Maintenance Ships) is to make it hard for you to get to the thing they are guarding (which are the more powerful specials like Ancient Ruins, Gaia, etc.), so that's definitely intenional too.

Monster frequency is set to low, by the way.

The guardian type monsters (Sentry, Maintenance Ship, Sentinel) aren't affected by this setting, unless you set it to "None" (which turns off space monsters completely). The monster frequency setting applies only to the non-guardian (mostly roaming) monsters (Kraken, Juggernauts, Snowflakes, etc.).

[Ruldra]

Thanks for the clarification. I guess in the end I just got unlucky with the way the guardians spawned.

[MatGB]

Yeah, set Specials to Low (or None) and you get less/no guardians, they are tough, intentionally, but actually not that hard to deal with if you've got the right ship types.