Specific Monster Reactions

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

From what I understand from the dev’s roadmap for the game, Mi-go are supposed to be sentient. In fact, they’re supposed to be slavers. Currently Mi-gos are only intelligent enough to understand when they’re about to die and book it, then come back when they’ve got enough blood left to take a hit or two and their target is still around.

If they’re supposed to be intelligent, why not have several ways of dealing with them? Or maybe just several ways of them dealing with YOU? An early-game Mi-go encounter equals death, if you can’t lose them in the forest or something, because they just run you down and maul you zombear-style. But they aren’t zombies, right? They’re intelligent. If you freeze and don’t move, maybe they move very slowly towards you instead of sprinting. Maybe there is some kind of pattern to their speech where they’re trying to sign you to lower your weapon. If you do drop your weapon, then…I’m not sure, maybe they initiate conversation somehow. Maybe this is the first instance in which a Mi-go and human have successfully communicated and they’re surprised. If you still don’t move but don’t comply, they initiate a special attack when they reach you and disarm you, and then force you to submit to capture, lest you suffer the fate of the corpses they’re currently spawned around. It’s like the police robots, except in their case maybe they actively drag you off somewhere. I’m not sure how that would go. It’d be an interesting turn in a survivor’s adventure to go from surviving from having to break away from Mi-go slavers.

You could use this for a variety of intelligent creatures responding to their target’s behavior like police-bots do, but it might not always go over as peacefully as waiting for your cuffs to run out of battery and then walking away without a scratch. It’d also give the player a chance to play the mysterious puzzle game of trying to make sense out of an enigmatic creature’s responses, if it’s even possible. How about those blue guys that always show up beside krecks and the amoebic molds? What a trip THAT thing could be.

2

The whole point of them being implemented the way they are is to avoid complexity.
My understanding of the mi-go ethos and mental state is that they don’t consider you to be worth communicating with, so they’re just going to try to kill or stun you instead of trying to “talk you down”. Either way they certainly don’t consider you worth cooperating with.
A “enslaved” scenario, while potentially interesting, would require an immense amount of development effort, and would have very low interest due to the fact that you would be “as good as dead” once captured, because the difficulty of escaping would be “nearly impossible”. If anything, human slavers would be a more interesting scenario since they wouldn’t be as good at it, so it would be much more likely to allow escape attempts.

3

Idk, maybe it could be a good custom scenario kind of thing. You’ve been stuffed in a cave with dead and dying humans by Mi-go, and an opportunity to escape has been presented via some means or another. A horde wandered in, maybe? From what I can tell, Mi-go are pure melee, and I don’t think they could take a horde any more than a group of survivors could with crowbars.

So the challenge would be that you’re surrounded by enemies, but they want to kill each other as much as they want to kill you.