Pvk,
Your idea would work. In fact you don't even need the map editor. You could start a game, save the map, start a new game with that map, save the map, etc. as many times as you wanted. Each time you started a new game with that map the game will put new planets in for the players. You could have dozens of empty "Homeworld" type planets. In fact you could do this without having a great knowledge of the quadrant yourself, so this is a very good suggestion.
By the way, I sent the follwing to Malfador...
quote:
Aaron,
I have another suggestion I would like you to consider. There has been much discussion about the Ancient Race trait being unfair. The main complaint seems to be that it allows you too pinpoint the position of all the other races at the very start of the game. This is very easily done by looking for worlds that have plus or minus 5% of all three resources and is the same conditions as your homeworld.
Having starting planets be different sizes doesn't really help because it is still statistically unlikely that all three resources will be in that small range. And different size starting planets has other problems as well.
What I would like to suggest is that you not be able to precisely gauge the resource percentages of a planet unless you have colonized it, or you have a robo-miner mining it. Even being in the same system should not allow you too know it's percentages.
Instead of know the precise percentages, it could be treated much like population happiness, race anger, and planetary conditions in that you have wide bands and the actual number is unknown. My suggestion for bands:
0 - 25 % Poor
26 - 50 % Below average
51 - 80 % Average
81 - 100 % Above Average
101 - 120 % Good
121 - 150 % Very Good
151 - up % Excellent
In this way home worlds that are 100 % plus or minus 5 % could be in either the Good or Above Average ranges in any of the three resources, and this would be a band that is from 81 -120%. Statistically a much larger group and thus impossible to pinpoint the exact location of the other races homeworlds. These bands would also mask planets when the players select high or low starting planet value, because I have value band breaks at 80 and 120%.
Note I am not suggesting you change the way the actual planet value is calculated by the game and so it should not affect resource production. Just blur the players ability at knowing the exact value of the planet.
In fact I suppose you could make it so even after the planet is colonized you don't know the exact percentage of the planet. You could calculate it I suppose by dividing the production by the number of resource facilities, but oh well. 
I have not attempted to give you similar ranges for finite resource games. I am not very familiar with that since I don't play them often, but I am sure suitable equivalents could be calculated.
I think my suggestion if implemented would eliminate the main "problem" with the Ancient race trait, and still leave much of it's value in locating good planets for colonizing and finding ruins. Hopefully it would not be extraordinarily hard to code this change. On the bright side it should not affect much other than the way planets are displayed. This actually should help the AI since they aren't smart enough to look for the others by this means to begin with, it will
"level the playing field" so to speak.
Thanks for a game so great that I care to make suggestions over a year after I started playing it.
George "geoschmo" Perley
Now I make a lot of suggestions. Some he does, some he doesn't do, some he doesn't even respond to. He is very busy. But maybe he will do this one.
Geoschmo