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?
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.
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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.
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
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
@Kaine, you really can play them on Triton method
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
@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.