Now that I've finished a Mechanoid army for Alien Squad Leader, the question arises: what sort of terrain will I need, assuming the Mechanoids sometimes fight battles on their own turf?
I immediately thought something lunar, lots of dark sand, functional looking buildings, craters, and roads for the robots to scoot along.
Then I thought: What would AI come up with? So I went back to our old friend, Deep Dream Generator, and I generated five pictures with this prompt:
Home planet of the Terminators. Lunar black sand. Steel and cement. Factories, ruins, buildings, slag pits, highways, craters. No atmosphere. Battleground. Ruined machines. On the moon. Dark as space.
And on the first try, I got lucky – it gave me a collage of four pictures! (I've never seen it do this before.) Presented below as four individual pictures.
I'm posting these pics at the original size, so you might need to click on them to see the full pictures.
OK, some good ideas here. Piles of dirt with black rocks. Steep rocky hills. Random rocks. And I don't know what that building is, but it's kinda cool.
More rocks. Another interesting sci-fi building in the distance. And whatever that sphere is – a derelict spaceship?
The tone is this picture is more what I'm looking for. Dark and brooding. Cool planet for a background. Are those rocks, or really worn down ruins? Flat terrain would probably be advantageous for a shooty army like the Mechanoids.
Another interesting building.
I like the idea of smokestacks, but would smokestacks make any sense on an airless world? (Maybe it doesn't have to be airless.) Slabby factory buildings, good. Some interesting tower-like structures.
More rocks, sand, slopes, and slabby concrete buildings. The big holding tanks are a good idea.
I really like this one. Dirt roads. Holding tanks built into the moon. Industrial equipment lying around.
Train tracks! I hadn't thought of that. Factories. Domes.
Now that I have some fresh ideas, I'll look at the Alien Squad Leader rules and see what would make sense in the game.