[Q]

Master Belisarius thank you for your comments.
I would like minesweepers as a special ship for the AI too. However in my experience the AI uses the minesweeper so badly (without protection) and does not include them into the fleets (so the fleet gets killed by mines), that I chose the other way.
As for the crystalline armor versus shields: I made the choice because of the research costs: level 1 shields 10000, level 1 crystalline armor 50000. But that's certainly something you might try to change and see if it works better the other way round.

Dumbluck the easiest way is to edit the quadrant text file in the data folder. Just remove the lines with the black holes or put the probability to 1% if you don't like to eliminate black holes completely. So you don't have to use the map editor at all. And in my experience the map editor is working very well.