[Puke]

ah, this takes me back. so many people used to make good scenarios.. okay, maybe only a couple. Geoschmo made great Voyager and Space 1999 scenarios. Someone else (sorry for forgetting who) made a great Andromeda scenario. Drone Wars was alot of fun.

There were a many good multiplayer scenarios too. One was a no-planet start where everyone started in a single system with just a colony ship. another was my Smash TV game, which has been running (very slowly) now for over a year. We might even have one of the original players left... There have been several more theme based games, and a couple of them involved some of the pregame scenario setup that you describe.

one trick was to log in as each of the players, and play a fixed number of turns. another trick was to give one race super technology through hacked research or ruins, and have them leave abandoned ships to be captured or give high tech items to low tech players. or to hack the facilities file, so players start with better things than they can build on their own. with hacked files, some of the options include overweight ships (causes problems with movement if the ship is ever damaged) or ships or planets with multiple spaceyards.