How about having a setting where you can keep everything dark, except show all home worlds. This would keep some of the aspects of Dark Galaxies while removing the whole *‘Where the *$%£ am I’ business at the start.
A counter setting would be one where the entire star map is known, however you don’t know who owns a star until it’s within scanning range.
I would find playing either of these types of games interesting.
Over the next few months I’m going to go a bit more reorganisation of the code to make it easier and cleaner as we expand and grow the game over the years.
I like dark galaxy games, but they have their obvious flaws. Some of which could be remedied by the overall suggestion regarding the map generation algorithm that should place the same number of stars within the given range of the homeworld. Everyone should have the same number of stars to jump to at the beginning.
The problem with starting with level 2 or 3 is this also increases the research cost. Getting an N ly scan range is harder than an N ly jump range.
Another option is to start at level 1 like normal, but give all dark galaxy games + 1 bonus scanning distance. So Scanning and Hyperspace have the same range for the same level.
It’s not perfect since it would lead to higher levels of scanning in the mid-late game, but without making any code changes one could set up the game starting at level 2 or 3 and with cheap research for scanning. That should balance out the early game increase in scanning research cost.
Maybe reveal the map layout to all players but don’t reveal their actual locations or their home worlds. This allows players to see where they are in the galaxy and choose where they want to expand to without revealing any positions. It can be a dark star with a ?? in the resources and can say this star is outside of the scanning range. Owner of the star is unknown. Scanning at level 2 is fine to start with. I think scanning 3 reveals too much and would make researching scanning useless early on.
Our group was thinking exactly the same thing. What I hate about dark galaxies is I see star x know it has resource y but if you loose the star that saw x then x disappears from the map. What? How do I loose a star?
If you have had the star within range and lost it, the natural resources stay the same. Maybe the natural resources can be visible but have a ?? where it shows their resources.