FreeOrion

One player has complained about having to "re-roll" the start many times to get an advantageous starting home system.

IamZeke wrote:5) Having to keep rerolling the game start. Just give it up already. One of the setup options should be "Rich Home System" with a yes or no. Give it an extra small planet that is of the same type as the species wants, a few other more difficult planets, a gas giant, and an asteroid belt.

Others have said that they re-roll sometimes to avoid certain situations (many empty systems around, or no adequate/good planets in the vicinity; usually you don't know this before scouting for a few turns), or even to avoid clear advantages over AI.

What's your case?

Feel free to suggest (or edit) amendments/additions to the poll options.

Unless I'm testing something (eg when rebalancing the Asteroid hulls) I virtually never restart.

I do sometimes give up on a game if it's going really badly, but never until I've played through quite awhile (turn 50ish at the earliest). Even if I'm stuck on a spur with a Sentinel blocking me off I know I can get through, and that sort of instance is very rare these days.

Obviously, with playtest head on sometimes I need a specific circumstance to test a specific thing but it's unusual to need that at all and then I'd rather hack the backed for that specific game.

I always play the cards dealt until the game is determined one way or the other. I'm more likely to terminate a game early because I'm too far out ahead than behind. But I enjoy the exploration/colonization/build-up part of the game. That includes challenges like inconveniently-placed monsters. Or sparse areas.

One of my recent ones I thought was point to be easy. I was playing Egassem, and right next door I found a large Inferno world. But that was the last good thing I found. The rest of the area was sparse, and what there was wasn't good even for Exobots. Lots of Ocean and Terran. Not a native world to be seen. Soon the scouts were way at the end of their tethers. I couldn't even string outposts to extend the lines because there was so much dead space.

Of course, that meant that there wasn't much concern about invasion either. I did find another Inferno in a Sentinel system, not too far from home. One thing I had figured out some time before is that if you have ships with structure > 36 (like Robotic Hull + 2 std plates) they can absorb two Sentinel hits without being destroyed. So if you have three ships like that, there's only a 1-in-9 chance that you'll lose a ship in a full-strength encounter. The one thing you know you have with Egassem is industrial might. So I got to making ships and taking care of business.

And so on. It was different. I liked it.

defaultuser wrote: Of course, that meant that there wasn't much concern about invasion either.

What size and shape galaxies do you normally play?

My typical is Cluster, 150 systems, low starlanes, low planets.

I usually prefer to have at least one other planet of decent quality within 6 jumps from my homeworld. The one thing I have been running across A LOT lately is a huge empty zone of empty jump points. The worst start I had was a string of 7 empty systems. Took awhile before I could even explore beyond my home system. As long as I have system to create outposts in having empties around isn't so bad but more often than not it gets really annoying.

A balanced start would be nice, but so would an option to stop the empty system madness. I think the probability for empties my be too high, especially for VERY large starting number. I have been running 1000 system games lately and often end up with an empire looking like a donut.

I've had my share of large clusters of empty systems, too, but I've never found this to be a problem. More like a stimulating challenge. The AI seems a lot worse at dealing with this than I am, anyway.

I've been tempted. Sometimes a bit severely. I'll post a screenshot of my latest one. Its causing me to play a long drawn out game of 250 turn+, however I AM winning because I adapted.

That's what I think is important, the ability to adapt. If Galaxy generation were 'perfect' in my opinion, what would happen is that some starter spots are initially hard for any race, but with enough adaptation you can make up for the early game lagging behind potential other races/starting positions, preferably through the use of some special planets which are on the dispute border between your empire and others.

On the other hand, if you get a naturally 'good' starting position that gives you access to planets which are easy to colonize without spending much RPs into adaptation, then those planets would be of average or below average value and you'd have to hunt a bit for some good stuff.

I got spawned as human on large terran, and the only things around me were tundra, barren, inferno, and gas giants, at the same time, the spacelanes are like 2-3 jumps long for a large hull basic.

I often will re-roll if I fail the game and play again more than twice. Knowing exactly what I want to do to win feels like it defeats the point. It's more fun and accomplished feeling to adapt to a seed by doing a glance over the neighborhood and adapting. It feels more like you're playing the game, rather than just refining "how to beat this specific instance".

Does the game check Player_Race while placing planets?

Only the home world. You can replay the game with the same seed but a different species to see. I've done that accidentally, thinking I had rolled the seed but hadn't. A few turns in it's, "Hey wait a minute, I've seen this!"

My latest had the local area stuffed with Terran and Desert worlds. Only problem, I'm playing Egassem. And the area is bottled up with a Sentinel on top of Acirema. I like a challenge.

Tempted to restart when done with Eaxaw and see how fast I could finish the game. But probably not.

Its weird to me because there's so much research to building up not only the RP and PP income, but also giving more population (which boosts income), and terraforming and all that.

its all cool but... the AI is pretty good at the genetic algorithm business from what I've seen. They have roboIIIs on your doorstep quite quickly and they'll start taking your bases with those 3.0 shielded ships vaping everything in their path if you lagged behind on your ship upgrades... so you need to upgrade ships, which is a deviation from getting all those nice upgrades.

The consequence seems to be that you first build to avoid dying, and then either go All-In, or keep teetering on being slightly under/overpower in military size while going into end game tech, which is going to take a long while.

You can't even move around until you build a basic deflector shield ship with some high damage to nuke those monster ships, but doing that is even more deviation, by funneling those PPs and SPs into tech like that early on, meaning less troop ships for taking AI planets and/or colonizing free planets, which slows PP/SP growth.

No, single player mode is for the weak.

L29Ah wrote:No, single player mode is for the weak.