So I've played quite a few games of ISG at this point and have never seen anything quite as wonky as my latest game. Of the 7 players, 5 of them are starting on the eastern side of the map (to be charitable, one is kind of in the middle). Four of the seven starting positions are in the bottom right quadrant. I'm not expecting abso-equal starting positions (or anything like that, really) but this one made me think I was looking at possible bug territory. What say you Adam? Savegame attached.
I've checked the save and can confirm the homeworld distribution leaned a bit towards the bottom-right area for that map, as you can see in the image in the spoiler below. Homeworld distribution Spoiler In that map, four players were spawned on the right side, one in the middle and two on the left side. I've made a test and generated many maps with those settings (Large, 7 players, 1x distance) and can confirm that the large majority of them produced more balanced results. So, this map was a "fun" outlier, and things seem to be working as intended, where the idea is to generate more balanced maps for the most part, but allow the occasional less evenly distributed one for variety and flavor purposes. In a Large map with 7 players, homeworlds will tend to be very close to each other, especially with the a 1x star system distance (the recommended number of players for a Large map is 5 or 6). Starting in a corner can have its advantages, but in this case it was bad luck to have quite a few AI opponents starting close by
Gotcha, working as intended -- for a single-player game this is totally accepttable; I'll take the odd "fun" positional challenge. I'm sure there will be times when I'm the one going "where is everybody? Thanks Adam! Keep up the great work, ISG has been my go-to for 4X enjoyment since, I dunno, sometime around 1.2 / Natural Law.
Yeah, that's the idea. Most of the times things are more or less evenly distributed. Occasionally, there could be an "where is everybody" moment to add to the fun You're welcome! The game received a lot of QoL improvements by 1.2. The Natural Law DLC added more content and variety, and by 1.3 the game reached a whole new level, with a ton of free new additions, including the new surrender pacts, the alliance victory condition, Steam achievements, a host of AI improvements and many more QoL improvements. The game is surely in a very good place at the moment, and it will keep expanding and being improved upon.
