Planet Distribution Controls Fun

Nothing Like Working Your Way Across The Galaxy To Find The Drengin Own One System

As the title states, the distribution of planets has a strong input on how fun a game is.

One of several things will happen.

1) You will get screwed and not find a good quantity of colonizable worlds nearby, and your opponents will, then you get steamrolled.

2) You find a bunch of planets and they don't, you steamroll them.

3) Roughly equal numbers of planets will be found by all (or enough), and you have a good game.

Without cheating, it's hard to know before you are several hours into a game which situation reigns. It makes the game more about random luck than about choices.

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I'm sympathetic to your points. Perhaps there is a way to turn lemons into lemonade? If discovering the ratio of your planet distribution to your opponent's is your prime strategic goal, then make decisions that accelerate the time of discovery--I assume your decision is to quit in either case 1 or 2? Or, resolve to create a strategy for each of the three scenarios:

(1) Survive with fewer worlds than your opponent--I know, easier said than done, but probably a prerequisite for truly mastering the game. In the meantime, learn to lose graciously while discovering defensive techniques you otherwise wouldn't;

(2) To keep the game competitive, try other ways to attain victory, perhaps by playing to the strengths of your opponent. Or, try to put yourself in position to win in multiple ways, holding off the end as long as possible;

(3) This is what you want, so no problem.

Perhaps there are victory conditions that are less sensitive to the planet distribution? Disable the other ones.

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I Wonder if they can add some content to the game so that you can have Tall empires, similar to the Civ kinda attitude.

Doesn't mean that you can compete with a 30 planet empire but you can get enough advantages from just focusing on a few planets that you can compete with someone who blobs in the first age?

Maybe make blobing worse on morale and economy and research untill you get more established.

Do you focus on initial research, economy etc or do you rush blob for the best planets and try and build a bit later.

It would be great if something was done to give more early empire diversity.

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I was thinking about how to balance out the early rush, to reduce the luck factor significantly.. For me as a builder type of player this is important, but i guess it will be important in multiplayer games too. i might make a topic about it as a mod idea one day, once I had figured out some details. Here is what i have so far :

((These are just ideas, and I'm not suggesting to use all these, just ways to balance out early game))

-reduce accelerated start, no colony ship, no colonization tech, no huge starting money, give some scouts instead: result: much slower start but players will scout their area and since no one will rushbuy colony ships everyone will have a fair chance to get about equal amount of planets.

-no habitable planets at all without proper colonization techniques (aquatic, toxic etc)

-habitable planets are protected by space monsters

-Colony maintenace: depending on number of colonies and the distance from capital . Make it significant in the begining, but create a tech line which reduces this cost so later big empires can be maintained without going bankrupt. This would help Tall empires and i think very realistic: you need to have good empire management to reduce bureaucratic cost.

-even less random map generator

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