Any way to place neutrals in map editor?

Coal · #1 October 19th, 2001, 05:57 PM

Is there any way to place a start location for neutrals only? Or do you just put the start location and hope that a neutral appears there? I like to place races close to my home systems, but I would sometimes rather have a simple neutral rather than a full race to cut my fleet's teeth on.

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Suicide Junkie · #2 October 20th, 2001, 06:22 AM

Well, neutrals are added Last (after humans and regular AIs), so if you place player positions 15-20 in there, they will likely hold neutrals.

Beyond that, I don't think you can.

Q · #3 October 20th, 2001, 07:16 AM

What happens if you save a neutral empire and load it in the next game. Do they remain neutral or behave as an ordinary non-neutral AI empire?

capnq · #4 October 20th, 2001, 10:10 PM

quote:
What happens if you save a neutral empire and load it in the next game. Do they remain neutral or behave as an ordinary non-neutral AI empire?

I think what will happen is that the game won't be able to find any AI files matching the name that you saved the empire as, so it will use the Default_AI files, but I haven't tested this.

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Beck · #5 October 21st, 2001, 02:43 AM

I believe its the location of the race folders in the RaceNeutral folder that first determines whether it is neutral or not. During the game setup, it simply applies the number of neutrals against a random selection of the available folders in the RaceNeutral. Only races in the folder are available to be used and tagged by the game setup as neutrals. Loading a race into a game would not go through the step for neutrals (the random selection which marks it as a neutral), hence I don't think they would be neutral. One could, I believe,put a copy of the Rage or any other nasty race in the folder and have it play as a neutral. I don't think there is any limit to the number of possible neutrals in the folder thought there is some sort of limit to those in any one game. I have been adding some of the older race sets whose AIs are out of date to this folder for use as neutrals.