does the "place empires evenly throughout galaxy" work?

[Nocturnal]

Hehe, in my current game I started in the same system with the Rage and blockaded their homeworld immediately, then researched troops and took them over with minimal fuss. Poor things are my servants now. But my highest-population world is an airless Rage world.

[Suicide Junkie]

Originally posted by oleg:
May be i should generate map, place starting positions manualy and load it ? But that will reduce the joy of exploration

Use a custom map generated by someone else.

For some really tense action, try the FQM sphere quadrant. You don't need lots of AIs to make that one hard

[Silent Sorrow]

Originally posted by Ed Kolis:
The rest of the galaxy wasn't filled with uninhabitable systems (nebulas, black holes, etc.) was it?

Nope, all standard.

[Silent Sorrow]

Like Geo said, it doesn't work.
By the way, are you playing with "bonus"?
Would be great to me, know how the Tessellate performed starting close to you.

I just downloaded the Tessellate race yesterday after reading though the ENTIRETY of that AI deathmatch 2 thread to find out which AIs I should play against. I didn't give the AIs any bonus points. Should I have? (All I did was set their difficulty to "hard".)

As for how the game's going, I'm crushing them simply because I expanded fast and was able to bottle them up in about five systems. I'm about to deliver the coup de grace. So it hasn't been anywhere near as challenging as I'd hoped for.

But I'm hoping the Vikings will give me more of a fight. And then there's the United Flora (which I haven't run into yet and I assume are on the far side of the quadrant opposite me), but from looking at the scores, I'm guessing that the Vikings are kicking UF ***. So it'll probably come down to me vs. the Vikings.

All that said, I think this match would be ENTIRELY different if the four empires really had started evenly spaced.

[Silent Sorrow]

Originally posted by geoschmo:

quote:

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Originally posted by Krsqk:
Does it evenly space empires, but not across the quadrant?

No. I have seen it stick five empires together on one half of the quad with one or two systems between and stick the Last empire by themself 8 systems away from anyone else.

It just flat doesn't work at all.

Geoschmo

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Do you think this is something that could be fixed by a modder or is hardcoded?

[Silent Sorrow]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:

quote:

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Originally posted by oleg:
May be i should generate map, place starting positions manualy and load it ? But that will reduce the joy of exploration

Use a custom map generated by someone else.

For some really tense action, try the FQM sphere quadrant. You don't need lots of AIs to make that one hard

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Where's a good place to get custom maps that I can use in this way?

I play only huge galactic edge quadrants (basically, the map type that will give the largest number of systems to play in) so that would be the type I was looking for.

[oleg]

Originally posted by Silent Sorrow:
I didn't give the AIs any bonus points. Should I have? (All I did was set their difficulty to "hard".)

Absolutely ! AI without bonus is basically what you see when you play your race with all ministers "on". If you ever tried it, you would appreciate the need for some AI bonus

[Arkcon]

Hey there, I'm jumping in late but I gotta say, the evenly spaced function does do something -- only when its turned off do you end up with two races in the same system . Really bad if the opponent is the Krill or the Amonkre.

BTW, the TDM modpack races do need at least a small bonus, to defend them against the possibility of starting surronded by meager planets. The Rage should have conqured the neutral and had 2 homeworlds by now. Survive that.

United Flora, with religious and organic racial techs, will need a bonus to complete research in a timely fashion. That's why the Space Vikings are winning, they don't use racial tech.

I just started a TDM game on medium bonus. Ouch. I have my home system. That's it. I researched frigates. The Krill had destroyers with DUC III. I got APB2 and Shield 2, they have LC, DUC V, Shield III. The Abbidion hate me, and glass worlds in between trade alliances, and to think I used to think they were nice orange puffballs.

[ July 21, 2003, 17:00: Message edited by: Arkcon ]

[Q]

One odd thing I realized about placing the empires: As a single human player I almost always have an AI empire in an adjacent system, even if there are few empires in a large quadrant with more than 200 systems. Did you see this too??

[Loser]

Originally posted by Q:
Did you see this too??

I do not see this. I play 20/255 cluster w/o connected warp points, generated and regenerated until all systems are connected.