Dark galaxy, starting scanning tech 3, others at 1. Turn-based game 8/24.
Here’s what I see:
Is there really no algorithm that can level out this kind of starting situation a bit?
Also, I’m not a very experienced player. Maybe I’m over-estimating how much a 8-vs-4 planet lead 16h into the game, and the lack of ability to find more planets in the next few days, matters?
No, your starting position really stinks. You have to get 2 levels of Range and a level of Scanning before you can get off of 4 stars. Effectively, you are screwed. Not to say you can’t still make a decent go at the game, but you are forced to upgrade stars that are very poor or already upgraded beyond your income to sustain.
Sure you could trade for tech, assuming others are going for range right away. Still, just a terrible situation. Jay might need to tweak the distribution if this happens very often.
Thanks for the validation.
This seems like a solvable problem. For example, allocate stars to the galaxy by creating similarly-resourced “starting clusters” with a few settled and a few un-settled stars or similar resource levels, and place them circularly/griddy/whatevery, then grow the galaxy based on roughly equidistant positions between existing home clusters.