Just a quick suggestion for Mike regarding the glaxy map generator.

Before I go through the idea I'll briefly explain my thinking behind it;
I think it's top of most people's wish list that that Galactic map is larger, much larger! We want to be able to send out Galaxy class ships for long range exploration, and as such there needs to be space to explore very late in the game. Also, ship ranges must gradually increase over time, to facilitate new frontiers becoming available for the latest ships. In addition to this, your borders will constantly expand outwards.

The problem I forsee is this, with space being so vast, and early ships being so short range, you might end up going through the entire Enterprise era without meeting another major race, hell maybe longer. Especially given the homeworlds are randomly placed.


The solution....

In the initial setup screen, (where you choose map size, starting tech level or other majors etc), have a proximity setting for each of the major races.

The 3 proximity ranges are, Close, Medium, and Far. Selecting Close will make the map grerator place that race's homeworld randomly within around 20 sectors of yours- Ensuring you meet them early, and have space bordering theirs. Medium would ensure that the race isn't too close, but you would meet them by around Excelsior level or so. Far, would have a min distance, but no maximum- Ensuring you won't meet them until late on. Of course you could just select random, meaning they could be anywhere.
Additionally, you should be able to give the generator 2 options to randomly select between.
For example, I'm starting a new game as Feds, I choose Klingons to be Cllose, Romulans either Close or Medium, Cardassians either Close, Medium or Far, and Dominion Far. That way I know I'll meet the Klings fairly soon, I could meet the Roms and Cardies any time, and I won't meet the Dominion for a while.
Standard setting could be all races set to Close or Medium, meaning there's a total element of surprise, you you'll have met them all by Ambassador level.

Just so you know, SonOfMogh, the galaxy size in the demo is a Small galaxy. If you'd like to see the huge galaxy in action, download the file below, unzip and overwrite the SupremacyCore.dll from the November 17 version of the UI Demo. Note that at the moment, I don't even have enough star names to fully populate a galaxy this size .

Huge Galaxy Patch: http://www.armadafleetcommand.com/botf/strobel/SupremacyCore.zip

FYI, hitting F12 will reveal the entire map in all of its glory.

Also, the distance between empires is has a minimum value of the side length of the map divided by the number of empires (minor races are not factored in). Setting a low, medium, or far proximity wouldn't really work for multiplayer games, so I'd have to write separate homeworld placement code for single player games. I'd like to avoid that, at least for now.

Good to know that a huge map will be an option! I understand that it wouldn't work in mulitplayer, probably worth revisiting at the end of the process whrn the game is finished. If "minor races" can expand in Supremacy, then I guess you'll always have adversaries and allies of some kind at quite close range.

Woah! That makes the map huuuge!

Obviously having the map that size has an impact on performance - it now takes between 2 and 3 econds for a turn to process on my computer, compared with barely a second on the small map version. The time is irrespective of if a system is selected or not, or even the zoom level on the map - I didn't notice any change in the speed of turn processing in these respects, Mike.

Whilst most people will hate having to wait, I think it is an acceptable pay-off on having huge maps. I severly doubt there's anything you could do to optimise it further anyway, Mike.

Yeah, considering it took like 30 seconds to render a galaxy of the same size back in my first game. A couple seconds is hardly out of the ordinary for a turn-based strategy game. Civ4 lags a bit later in the game, and don't get me started on the original BotF. Gigantic galaxies don't come free.

Quantum Computing.... Instantaneous turns no matter the size and complexity

Get to it Mstrobel no time for slacking, i'am sure it's "relativley" simple

Cheers, cdrwolfe, that one made me laugh .

Oh, and I neglected to mention that there are five galaxy sizes (Tiny, Small, Medium, Large, Huge). So if small isn't enough and huge is too big, you've got two intermediate choices.

Well a 20x20 grid will do me i think. I dont want it too big so that it takes ages to get from one side of map to other.