Thought I'd just give a pointer to readers of this forum as well, as this seem to have improven the gaming experience of many. The point of these maps is to make them interesting, characteristic with unsymmetry and strategic points, balanced, and force to players to battle eachother instead of turtling inside their own pie-slice of the galaxy. If this sounds interesting to you, check out this thread:
New style pre-made maps
Awesome work dude! I'll definitely check out these maps in further detail the next time we play TI3!
I have def. been meaning to switch to pre-made maps for a more balanced game.
Now I just need to kick my distant suns habit
OrangeSoda said:
Now I just need to kick my distant suns habit
Nothing wrong with Distant Suns if you like 'em. Yeah, they are random and slow down the game, but I like 'em too.
Like Sigma says. Nothing "wrong" with distant suns. Even though they might shake off the balance a bit, you still have a fair map with much intensity and conflict, which is the most important here. Distant Suns will therefore, hopefully, do little to downgrade your gaming experience with this.
There are some 'balancing' Distant Suns rules in SA that helps a bit. Like Natural Resources being slowly drained from a planet thus being a new incentive for battle (other than 4$ straight to his pocket, totally ruining the game), automatic probing to give the player some info to base his strategy on, and a lot of things... you could check it out.