Ideas for imperium games

[RefSteel]

In case anyone wants to try this out, I created a script to automatically transform a normal galaxy into a ring/donut. For example:

[IMG]["Silis" image to be rehosted because photobucket is terrible][/IMG]

It's a bit of a giant kluge, but it does work automatically, without providing any spoiler info. In case someone with access to r4 rexx wants to use and/or mess around with it, I've attached the script itself (and a batch file to run it). I've also attached a bunch of save games - one for each race, in Medium galaxies at Impossible difficulty, with five opponents each - for anyone who wants to play around in a ring galaxy and see what happens.

[IMG]"Klacks" likewise[/IMG]

The two shown above, plus the Psilons, Humans, and Mrrshans, have a slightler wider "ring" than the maps I rolled for the other five races (I'm not sure what ratio of "donut" to "hole" size is best; it can be set arbitrarily in the script, up to limits imposed by the map size). In these cases, I'm not sure how noticable the difference will be.

[IMG]"Boids" likewise[/IMG]

Some known issues with the script:

1. It can't handle Large or Huge galaxies right now. I might be able to figure out how to fix that, but not today. Small galaxies likewise have so few stars that I'm not sure how useful it is right now for any non-Medium galaxies.

2. I'm not sure how it handles nebulae, but I suspect some planets well outside of nebulae will have purple battle backgrounds and prevent the use of shields, whereas stars clearly inside nebulae may look and act normal for combat purposes. The chances of rich and/or non-habitable planets in nebulae will also be skewed. Nebulae should reduce ship speeds normally however.

3. There is currently no guarantee that homeworlds will be especially far apart (from one another or Orion). In theory, You might even be in contact with another race from the first turn of the game. This can certainly be fixed when I or someone has time. By the same token, it is probably somewhat [EDIT:more] likely in a ring galaxy created with this script than in a normal game that you will have zero habitable worlds within three parsecs of home. That's probably also fixable, under the same circumstances.

[IMG]"Zards" likewise[/IMG]

That's about it. If anyone decides to give one of these a try, let me know what you think (and what other bugs you catch!) Note that, unlike the Imperia, the attached maps have not been vetted or playtested AT ALL. They could be stupidly easy or impossibly hard or boring or anything else; I don't know anything about them except what the maps looked like before and after getting run through the scripts - these were created strictly (and QUICKLY) for playtest/exploration purposes.

[novice]

That's pretty cool.

[Vanshilar]

Cool. I have a few deadlines coming up in the next few weeks (not to mention the next Imperium), but a donut map will be what I try next. I'm kinda curious how the game will end up, i.e. whether or not any of the donut maps will result in a faraway runaway AI while the player is busy dealing with the closest neighbors, which is what leads to the challenge.

I was originally thinking of writing a script that simply takes existing star locations, and just transforms the coordinates into a donut shape (i.e. they'd simply move radially in/out from the center of the map into a donut shape, based on their original locations). Hopefully that would decrease the chance of the nebula issue, as well as the homeworld issue. I'm not sure how your script works though, i.e. if it takes the current locations as an input or if it just generates locations randomly.

If the map size doesn't change, then doesn't that mean that converting a randomly distributed map into one with a donut shape actually results in stars being closer to each other? Since the donut shape means parts of the map won't have any stars, it implies the stars are being squeezed into a smaller volume and hence, closer to each other (for the closest neighbors). I would have thought it means that you're more likely to have habitable colonies nearby.

[RefSteel]

I was originally thinking of writing a script that simply takes existing star locations, and just transforms the coordinates into a donut shape (i.e. they'd simply move radially in/out from the center of the map into a donut shape, based on their original locations). Hopefully that would decrease the chance of the nebula issue, as well as the homeworld issue. I'm not sure how your script works though, i.e. if it takes the current locations as an input or if it just generates locations randomly.

The script I created is, as mentioned, a giant kluge: It defines the area of the ring, finds all the stars that aren't in it, and randomly places them in locations in the ring with at least a minimum distance between them and any other stars. If you moved all the stars radially toward the ring as you described though, the nebulae would still be in the wrong places unless you moved them along with the stars (I believe this can be done however). I didn't do this because I felt it would result in too many stars that were too close together in too many cases.

If the map size doesn't change, then doesn't that mean that converting a randomly distributed map into one with a donut shape actually results in stars being closer to each other? Since the donut shape means parts of the map won't have any stars, it implies the stars are being squeezed into a smaller volume and hence, closer to each other (for the closest neighbors). I would have thought it means that you're more likely to have habitable colonies nearby.

The stars are indeed closer together for the most part, but I believe MoO's native map creation script almost always places a habitable world within 3 parsecs of the player's location (by design). As such, though the chance of a habitable planet accidentally appearing near your homeworld is indeed greater, I believe the overall chance is (at least) slightly less, since the script might move your homeworld or "its" habitable star to a completely different location and then leave you without one by random chance.