Spawning new empires in-game

[geoschmo]

Imperator Fyron said:
I am quite certain. I have seen more empires spawned from PPP after killing/conquering one of the old ones.

So I am curious what happens to the player order when this happens. In my experience a spawned empire is also put at the end of the list. Butw when an empire dies they are not removed from the list and still show on the player select screen that comes up when you load the game as a dead empire. So if you have 15 live empires and 5 dead ones and a new empire is spawned, does it replace one of the dead empires, or does it get put at the end of the list, in which case you'd have more then 20 in this list. Do you have an old save game where you can see more then twenty total spots in this empire list when you load the game?

[Fyron]

The score and diplomacy display screens clear dead empires, however.

I have never checked the player selection screen explicitly after seeing new empires spawned. Don't they tend to be neutrals?

All of my old savegames were lost in hdd failure.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

Empires which have been eradicated still appear in the game master's Players screen, and unchecking them, so that you would play them, results in the "[%EmperorName] of [%EmpireName] Your turn is beginning" (or something along those lines) message appearing at the start of each turn. This does not happen for the defeated empire. Just thought I'd mention it.

[geoschmo]

I have run another detailed test and I am more convinced then before that I am correct. Once you reach 20 empires total (dead+alive) the game will not spawn any more new empires. I ran a test with 12 empires, spent the first few turns surendering them down to just two empires. Then I had one empire build some intel facilities and start running ppp projects. For a while it worked. Not every ppp worked, as has been discussed before in other threads. Some of them failed and the other half resulted in new spawned empires. Each time an empire spawned, it was placed at the end of the list and given a neutral looking flag. This continued until 8 new empires had been spawned, giving me a total of 20. From this point no additional empires have been spawned through several turns.

Since that point the succesful ppp operations result in the planet changing sides from one empire to another instead of spawning new empires.

I don't doubt that you guys think you saw this happen, but I just don't think it's possible.

Geoschmo

[Urendi Maleldil]

This is true. It was something that came up during the SE4 beta. The max number of empires in a game (alive or dead) has a hard-coded limit of twenty.

[Renegade 13]

Guess I must be mistaken! Just goes to show what I know...