Re: This may be too many planets...
 

Narf: Read the rest of the thread. Even in ST and SW, and even HHGTTG (oh I forgot you haven't read those. SACRILEGE!!!!!) travel between systems takes absurdly long. In HHGTTG, the fastest hitchhike from the one side of the galaxy to the other took five years - and that was as fast as possible. In SW, I don't know exactly, but it also takes quite some time. In ST, even travel between some systems placed far between can take two months. I believe that you would need several months of continuous Warp 9 travel to get from one side of the Federation to the other, and remember Voyager? 70000 lightyears... I believe it was 60 or 70 years (could also be 35). And since this galaxy is 100000 lightyears in diaeter, well...

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

Actually, I agree with Narf. Let this just be a map mod that other modders can incorporate if they wish to, just like FQM.

Great work Geo! Are you trying to break the PBW server? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

Ok, new idea. I played around a bit with Fyron's suggestion of four sub-systems per system. I realized that four stars could be spaced so I could use two rings of planets around each star and not interfere with each other. This would actually permit more planets then you'd have with nine subsystems if you wanted to stuff it full. However, it's not very astheticly pleasing. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

What four stars with two planetary rings does allow me to do is use less than the maximum number of planets and introduce some randomness to each subsystem. So they start to look more like tiny star systems instead of fuzzy dice. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

The empty sectors between planets could could have asteroids or storms even.

Here's an example. This was created by moving planets around in the paint program. I haven't updated the mod data files to actually produce these system types. What I'd need to do is create a little script to make several system types that are all similer with some randomness in planet placment so they don't all look alike.

http://seiv.pbw.cc/ultrasystem2.gif


This gives us much better looking sub-systems, while still having almost as many planets as the 9-by format.

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

I think the 4 star one looks nicer. It could also be designed to allow for a bit more variation in the placement of planets etc.

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

Why not keep the original way you've done it and add the four system set-up as an additional option?

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

i dont know if you could make it impassible, but you could create a destructive border between subsystems. wormholes would have to be placed in each system with the map editor.

also, you will have to tweak crystiline solar resource generation. lowering it by 1/4 or 1/9 will actually be harder on crystiline races, as there will be no trinary systems for them to take advantage of.

and stardestroyers will be really harsh in this... ouch.

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

I wonder what this would do to the highliner mod... would make for some interesting scenarios, where riders could perform limited interstellar travel...

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

Would also make Neutral AI somewhat more of a challange in stock games.

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

Absolutely! The AI should love this mod, it might slow down their expansion, though.

Re: This may be too many planets...
 

Another thing... You need to divide the affects of star-based items by the number of stars in each system. Solar Collectors and Solar Resource Generators (crystalline facilities) will be 4 or 9 times as powerful, depending on the number of stars you end up using.