These entities should be near godlike in their power, requiring a military-geared bionic powerhouse of a character to plausibly attack. Each should have their own terrain preferences, diurnal cycle, and set of behaviors. Avoiding them completely should be relatively easy but of paramount importance to early and midgame characters. Brave players could tail one, watching it obliterate other monsters it’s not aligned with, looting the swath of destruction like a vulture, but god help them if they find themselves caught between hammer and anvil.
Like okay, the Elder Vampire tends to move toward the nearest city terrain and patrol it aggressively at night, but during the day moves toward the nearest forest or cave squares on the map and remains stationary. The Elder Vampire is hostile toward anything and can often be seen annhilating zombie hordes with its incredible powers by players bold enough to get close to one.
On the other hand, the BattleMech tends to head toward the largest city on the map and patrol it, doesn’t care what time it is, and is unhostile to police and military robots. It’s basically just a Super Tank Drone of incredible power, a one-of-a-kind prototype unleashed in the face of the apocalypse.
Depending on which one of these was in the area, you might change your behavior in a number of ways. If the Elder Vampire is in the area, then you only go into town during the day, and you sleep through the night somewhere secure. On the other hand if the BattleMech is the biggest dog in the local ecology, maybe you base yourself outside of town and only go in at night.
If both of them are in the neighborhood, maybe it’s best to just lay low for a while. Or better yet, arrange for them to meet. Or if you’ve finally become a bionic death commando with a nuclear bazooka, maybe it’s time to just ride out there and show them who’s the boss around here.
These creatures should spawn dynamically as the size of the revealed gameworld increases. IE, once you’ve revealed X amount of map, one more miniboss will spawn somewhere on that revealed map. Maybe right in front of you, but probably back somewhere you last visited months ago. But don’t worry, they move around. You’ll run into them eventually even if it takes a year or two.
You want to keep the density of supermonsters pretty low so that a player can build a little cabin or base somewhere and have reasonable hope that one won’t just randomly show up on the doorstep in the first couple months. In the long term, maybe players could somehow sacrfice an artifact to make a given square invisible to certain supermonters for a period of time.
In the really long endgame sort of term, maybe the day the Elder Vampire blundered into the set of landmines and laser turrets you’d been building for the last two years was just a really interesting day. Let’s face it, you were pretty much looking forward to this every time you went out to lay down some more barbed wire and claymores outside the shelter.
Add a function to radios where if they’re turned on, a crackly broadcast that amounts to “supermonster A spotted near coordinate B” will chirp occasionally. Smart players will note those coordinates on their map with the time/date so they can piece together which direction these guys are moving.
Oh yeah, and whenever one of these supermonsters croaks, they have a chance of dropping a piece of the Great McGuffin, which if completed will allow you to go through one of those portals and invade the 4th dimension. Endgame stuff.
