Custom map guidance & game type

I’ve been thinking a bit about map design and thought I’d play about with custom maps, but I’ve got a bit puzzled. Turns out there’s two styles:

Triton: specify the start locations of each player, everything else is generated.

Proteus: specify everything about the stars

The triton generator is fiddly but I’ve worked it out. What confuses me is that as far as I can tell you can’t create a proteus custom game. Am I missing something?

As far as I can tell, if you try the proteus style on a triton game you just get an error message (I just tried it with the example star Is in though). So I presume (as is implied by the help) the proteus custom style won’t work on triton. Can anyone confirm?

Jay disabled the custom game creator for Proteus, so for now, you can only create custom games for Triton.

For a start, you could try the custom Three neighbors map 16L.

.

Shame. The triton method is not flexible enough for interesting custom maps.

1
What “flexibility” are you looking for ?

Did you look at my Google Drive and download my MS Excel files ?
After you make a copy, then you can remove the protections, and edit the HW positions or formulas.

2
You can also try the map editor tool from @Dysp .

.

The kinds of thing I was thinking about basically relate to either changes for balance purposes (e.g. Random scatter patterns that aren’t as wildly divergent, ensuring everyone has a maximum range route to centre) or deliberate asymmetry to create varied scenarios (e.g. Natural Choke points, central star improvement).

For style I also was considering a spiral galaxy pattern.

Using either my MS excel spreadsheets or Dysp’s map editor tool, you can pre-plan HW locations, and maybe use a math formula to create a spiral galaxy.

Past gamers experience often complained about empires near the edges of galaxies being more powerful than empires inside the cores of galaxies. So perhaps there is way to position HW locations to be more fair ? That was one of the motivations of my custom Three Neighbors maps

For a bright galaxy, you just have to do trial & error, and discard & revise the failures until you create a galaxy that you like. Jay’s random scatter algorithm is not something that you can control, except indirectly via HW locations.

For dark galaxies (might need a password), the creator of that galaxy has the administrator privilege capability to quit & rejoin as each & every empire separately to inspect the map, but only within starting scan range. There could be unexpected HR gaps outside of scan range that would not be discovered until after the game started.

Or… The proteus json method could be available and it would be fairly trivial to generate alternative map templates :stuck_out_tongue:

Just a shame it’s not really

Just a bit off topic:
I already created some costum maps. Was always fun to play them!
Some symmetric maps, but also asymmetric maps related to real constellations, e.g. Hercules or Scorpion. Perhaps @HULK or @Trucriot can remember them :wink:

Best map was a 24 player costum map back in 2015 or so. Too sad that you can only do 16 player maps on costums nowadays ;-(

Still remembering that we crashed the game badly, @Trucriot :joy:

So @Kaine, just let your fantasy create a map, whatever you‘re thinking of. Would say that most maps will work pretty good!

I sometimes wonder about creating custom maps that might reflect similarly to current or past geopolitical situations here on the Earth’s surface. :slight_smile:

This screenshot of mayhem

was from the northwest region of my custom Three Neighbors map 24L
.

@DarkDragonwing but can you actually play those? Does the json “specify everything” method work?

@Kaine where are you reading that ? Jay disabled the Proteus method.

The Triton method json only specifies up to 16 HW x & y coordinates good up to 4 decimal places.

I don’t see how you can make @DarkDragonwing 's maps with the triton method, so yeah my question is really whether those custom maps can be made reality these days

Nvm on closer inspection I see how they were made.

@Kaine, you really can play them on Triton method :wink: :grin:
And yeah, they are playable, too. Even though everyone has some different starting position! I tried to keep distances between the HW more or less equal, so every player will meet up with their neighbours soon. Was fun to play them all :smile:

@xjhdexter
Pretty cool costum maps! I really miss the option to create 24 player costum maps…

And I appreciate maps like you mentioned that reflect similarly current or past geopolitical situations here on Earth or in our Galaxy. Would be pretty awesome to play maps like that - IMO.

If you know the math for trigonometry, then mostly any map can be designed limited by your imagination.

You can still make some pretty good maps, if you only just know the pythagorean formula.

@DarkDragonwing. That map was absolutely massive. Millions of ships and 24 (!) tick jumps. Definitely the most epic game I played.

Here’s a screenshot I took back then from a part of the map: