Mostly linear maps
Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 4:43 pm
It's been brought to my attention that several currently-active games appear to have maps with lots of long, linear chains of worlds and very little branching.
This wouldn't be so bad, except that it seems to really negatively impact gameplay: some players end up far isolated from their nearest neighbors, and even when they do eventually meet up with someone, it's very difficult for players to interact in general.
This is all part of the random "initial galaxy parameters" that the RSW server chooses when a game begins. Sometimes, it happens to start a game with a very low "Connections" parameter, which ends up generating a map like this. It just so happens that several recent games have had a very low "Connections" parameter.
But I think these maps are too extreme. It's not fun if you can't interact with your neighbors. Therefore, I've just tweaked it so that in the future, a very low "Connections" parameter won't be quite so low as these games have been. Hopefully, the new setting will still be low enough to provide some interesting map variations and make the games challenging, but not so low as to make the game no fun to play.
David
This wouldn't be so bad, except that it seems to really negatively impact gameplay: some players end up far isolated from their nearest neighbors, and even when they do eventually meet up with someone, it's very difficult for players to interact in general.
This is all part of the random "initial galaxy parameters" that the RSW server chooses when a game begins. Sometimes, it happens to start a game with a very low "Connections" parameter, which ends up generating a map like this. It just so happens that several recent games have had a very low "Connections" parameter.
But I think these maps are too extreme. It's not fun if you can't interact with your neighbors. Therefore, I've just tweaked it so that in the future, a very low "Connections" parameter won't be quite so low as these games have been. Hopefully, the new setting will still be low enough to provide some interesting map variations and make the games challenging, but not so low as to make the game no fun to play.
David