Khellendros, on 22 January 2019 - 05:36 PM, said:
Giving it some further thought re build-your-own-layout, while it would be cool in a table game, in a forum game it probably takes too much time even with D’rek’s amendment, as you will want to see what the map looks like after each tile is put down so that you know the current shape and viable placements. While I could do that there’s no guarantee the map update will always be speedy. Whereas with the predesignated layout you know which spots have been taken even without an immediate update.
What about giving players the opportunity to each design a "pizza slice" of space by giving each a roughly equivalent # of production and influence on planets, plus enough empty hexes and anomalies to fill that slice from ring 1 to the home planets?
Once the slices are built, we can then randomize starting order and move to the "select a race/ starting position" draft.
That way, building a sector in such a way it is guaranteed to fuck with its owner (say, only empty hexes around the starting planet) likw it happened to Twelve last game could backfire spectacularly as you may end up with it yourself; building something okay but not great would be a better option.
The result would probably look somewhat like D'rek's initial map, in which each race also had natural dominion over 2-3 systems and would in addition have 2-3 systems it would have to compete for/ negotiate over with neighbours.
Building the map would be fairly straightforward, too, since one would not have to wait a couple of days before the next hex, nor would negotiation across time zones be necessary.
Everyone is entitled to his own wrong opinion. - Lizrad