[ColdSteel]

I'm NOT playing in an ancient galaxy and I have black hole systems all over the place. Nebula systems too. I think something is not right with the way black holes and nebula systems are generated and I think I know what it is.

In my current game my whole empire's (galactic) south flank is guarded by entire chains of black whole systems. I just used the default setting for large galaxy. I've seen other Posts on this topic too. This can ruin a game. I've been at war for 50 turns had my enemy can't even get to me.

What I think is happening is that this is an artifact of a random number generator function. None of those are truly random and what I think we are seeing is a "clumping" effect where a large portion of the galaxy may not have any of these systems at all and yet one section of it has nothing BUT these systems. This effect can be more pronounced in small galaxies (all or none distributions) or large ones where the sample is large enough for the algorithm to show the clustering effect.

My suggestions to correct this problem are:

1) Make black hole and nebula systems uniformly distributed as a given small percentage of the galaxy's systems and not just a random distribution.

2) Or, model it after real galaxies where dark matter is more concentrated in the center of the galaxy. There you would expect to see more black holes so maybe pattern the distribution from the edge in so that there are very few to none on the edges and more in the center.

3) At the very least, use a better random number algorithm that has a more uniform distribution.

I think option 2 also has the added benefit of preventing empires being trapped in corners on startup by these systems. If they're concentrated more in the middle, there should be a better chance of other warp points to move around them.

The bottom line is that I think the distribution of these systems should be somewhat random in the game, but not completely random as it now appears that it is.