Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => C# Mechanics => Topic started by: skoormit on August 06, 2020, 08:25:22 AM
-
In my current playthrough I used these settings for Local System Generation:
Chance 100%
Spread 30
Attached is the galaxy map after exploring 27 systems (two more are known only via alien intel from Cerberus; you can see one of these on the map).
This is the most satisfying galaxy I have yet explored.
The balance between dead ends, branches, and loops is just about perfect for me--although I do expect to find more loops as I continue exploring.
What do others think? What makes an ideal map for you?
-
I've been using a 10% local system chance lately and I quite like the maps that generates. I've never tried 100 percent before as I assumed that would trape in my starting system, but that seems to not be the case based on your map and settings.
-
Sorry for "necro-ing" an old thread, but I was about to post basically the same question, and this came up on the list of suggested prior posts (which is an awesome feature for a forum, btw!).
I recently played with the defaults (50% and 15, I believe) and set minimum connections for Sol to 5, and I can't say I love the resulting map. It's basically a five-armed star, with each arm occasionally branching, all centered on Sol. The five arms do not interconnect at all; to get from one to another, you MUST go through Sol. I started a test game with parameters set to 90% and 15, and after using Spacemaster to explore 27 systems, got a map that I like a lot more, copied below. However, testing it one more time, I got a map that was less loopy and much more standard branching with minimal to no loops.
I can't make sense of the first parameter, either, since with my settings it seems to imply a 90% chance of linking to an existing system (within the last 15 systems generated), but I'm not seeing anywhere near that number of links back to existing systems. I assume that would then give a 10% chance of linking to a "non-local" system, i.e. one more than 15 numbers away from the one just discovered? And does this apply to each jump gate explored?
Has anyone else experimented with these, and can you share what parameters you used and what your map looked like as a result?
-
Basically, the way the jump point network is constructed for random stars is: When a JP is explored, a system number is generated randomly subject to the two parameters, and the JP links to a system with that number (this is separate from the system ID). If a system with that number already exists, the JP connects to that existing system, otherwise a new system is generated. KNowing this, the two tunable parameters make more sense:
- The first parameter controls the chance of linking to a "local system" or generating a new system number completely at random. Increasing this value should generally increase the amount of loops in your JP network, but it depends closely on the second parameter.
- The second parameter defines the range of system numbers which can be considered "local", which will be the number of the JP origin system plus or minus the parameter value. A smaller value here will increase the number of loops in your JP network, however it will also tend to make loops smaller and you may tend to see in some cases "clusters" of JP loops separated by a bottleneck JP.
With Random Stars games I usually set these values to 60 and 12 and the resulting maps have generally been suitable with a good amount of JP loops once you explore a few layers away from Sol. I have tried occasionally to go more extreme, e.g., 90 and 5 for example, but it is a delicate balance as with too much looping you tend to not generate enough new systems to keep the game interesting, unless you have a large number of races to start with.
Among the bolder players on this forum, Stormtrooper in his latest AAR generated this rather complicated network (https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/835656241820336158/880933209263726662/unknown.png), but alas I do not know what settings he used for this. At any rate if you like this sort of thing you can send him a PM probably, at least you know what is possible now. ;)