uh... You know what, I've been accused of being anal before. And honestly, on the map of anal retentiveness I think I'm getting close to the event horizon. That's why I like detail 'saturation' games like SE IV!
But it never, EVER occured to me that anyone would be crazy enough to want to build an entire map from scratch with the editor!
Even a small map of 75-100 systems can have over 1,000 seperate objects! Do you REALLY need that much control? Just generate a random map and use the editing function to tweak it a bit. You'll still have fun playing on it, trust me.
Half of the fun of the game is dealing with the random distribution of planets and resources, after all! Just add a few good planets in the AI starting systems to give them a boost, or move some warp lines around to make some interesting strategic situations. Besides, the more time you spend in the map editor, the less time you've got for testing weapon mods in the combat simulator!
[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 03 May 2001).]