Has anyone started working on a Huge Canon Map yet? Just want to check before giving it a try.

Game is Alpha stage but canon map is planned.

No one has made a canon map yet though as mentioned it is hopefully gong to be implemented. If you want to make one feel free a list of minor races can be found below and there subsequent quadrant positions.

Giving the complexity of creating a map with fixed 'planetary system' positions which has to scale to other map sizes and somehow work around including other empty systems could prove harder then one would hope.

Who knows, i haven't heard if MStrobel has mentioned its implementation yet.

http://www.trekmania.net/temp_files/botf2_home.htm

Regards Wolfe

I think I'm going to take a stab at it then, as long as I'm not stepping on any toes. It will be a huge undertaking but someone's got to do it, and if it's going to take quite a bit longer to develop the game systems and write the code, someone may as well start now.

Go for it . I don't know how you plan to do it, but I'd recommend you start by taking a sheet of graph paper, drawing Sol in the center square, and work your way outward from there. Then do the same for each of the other empires on a separate sheet of graph paper. Once that's done, you can cut out the blank space around the outermost stars and put the cutouts for all the empires down on a large table and work out their orientation with respect to eachother. If you're lucky, you'll have some stars that appear on more than one sheet, in which case you can use those to match them up. If there aren't any common stars between two sheets, I recommend orienting them such that the minimum distance between other empires' homeworlds is roughly the same for each empire. Once you've got them all laid out, tape them together for reference. Find yourself a good graphics program that has 'snap to grid' capabilities, and create a large blank image with an appropriate grid size. Then draw small sector-sized circles for each star and label them. If you have a good digital camera, you can just take an overhead photo of your paper-based map, import it into your graphics program, and use it as the image background so you can draw over it. Since the individual sheets are probably rotated differently, the squares graph paper grid and the grid in your graphics app won't line up perfectly, but you can just pick the nearest square for any star.

That's just a suggestion, though--you can do it any way you want.

Thanks for the go ahead. Yeah, I've made a 40x40 grid square representing one quadrant that i can put counters on for different systems. Once I've done, say the alpha quadrant, I can clear it and use the same grid to design the others.

There are a few things I want to run by everyone, but specifically the designers what concept they had for the map distribution. Rationally, the traditional powers (feds, Roms, Kling, Card) would be distributed across the alpha and beta quadrants ie. a 80x40 grid. The Dom and Borg would then go at the furthest extremes of the Gamma and Delta quadrants respectively, with randomly generated 9or randomly attributed in the design) systems filling the gaps.

I guess I can see two problems on the horizon in terms of design and plausibilty.

i) because the alpha/beta quadrants are together 80x40, the maps going to be kind of skewed. I don't know how anal people are about it but I'd brefer to encroach on the 'northern' quadrants to get a bit mor breathing room. otherwise the systems will be closer to them vertically than they would be horizontally. Also, because we know so little about the gamma/delta quadrants, essentially a lot of that space will be wasted by anonamous systems and no minor races (if we assume that the minor races are close to the dominant empires). It seems a shame to have a map that big and then cram three of the empires onto one of the maps. Seems a bit of a waste of space considering how much action takes place there.

ii) access to the gamma/delta quadrants in the trek universe is made out to be completely unfeasable due to the great distances between them. figures around 70 years are mentioned when discussing travel to the main parts of the quadrants. In the story the borg use trans warp conduits and the dom are only accessible using the wormhole. on our conventional map it may turn out that the borg and dominion may be only 20 turns from alpha quadrant powers, effectively making them accessible by warp and contradicting the world.
i have an idea to solve this problem, but i've no idea whether it can be implemented or even be accepted by gamers. How about some kind of 'buffer zone' in between the inaccessible quadrants. would it be possibe to use a band of maybe five or ten special squares where it takes 10 turns to cross each one? this would effectively mean that it would take a ship 50 turns to cross the gulf of space. some script could come up saying something about entering the vastness of unexplored space, proceed? or something. This would make it possibe to access them, but completely unfeasable to conduct combat, trade etc.
could be genius, could be pants. please let me know what you think.

now, back to my map...

Yes, 4 major empires and hundred minor empires in 40x80 grid is too much but its canon. You don t need to place every minor race in 100% correct position, only important one ( Andorians, Vulcans and Tellarites for Federation or Bajorans for Cardassians... dont worry most of Earth population can not find their countries on World map)

I m looking forward to see results of your work.

Few things to help you out:

http://www.st-minutiae.com/graphics/hum ... es/map.jpg

http://www.st-minutiae.com/misc/restora ... ration.jpg

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/incon ... istian.jpg

http://www.stdimension.org/Cartography/ ... yroute.jpg

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads9/Star_trek_map2.jpg

LOL I don't think that first map is particularly canon, Zeleni - I didn't know there was a planet called "fred" in the Romulus system, and apparently the Galaxies biggest ball of twine is so important it needs a map reference!

You have eagle eyes Matress


Btw. We need new minor race images current are to old and low res (Mike's beautiful game deserves better pics)

http://www.botf2.com/Shared%20Documents ... Items.aspx

I've got the DS9 series to tae pics from if you'd like, just giv me an episode and race and i'll try and get some pics.

Regards Wolfe

I can shut off quadrants easily enough. I was thinking about doing that anyway. You can just lay out the map however you want--it can be irregular and not a full spiral.

First we should ask Matress if those pics are the only ones we have

Mike, would it be possible to choose whether the quadrants are on or off as an option in the game settings? People can decide themselves that way. Just a thought.

After doing some quick designs, I take it back. I think that maintaining the four quadrant system and keeping the alpha quadrant powers to 80x40 will make for a much more interesting challenging map. I think I'd forgoten how big our map actually is. One quarter of one of the quadrants is nearly the same size as the original BOTF map. Should be loads of room.

Thanks for the pointers regarding maps. I'll show you the one I've mostly been using from 2002's 'Star Charts', which was published to comply with canon at the time. It'll need a bit of manoeving but it's a pretty good guide. Let me know what you think.

Still keen on the idea of some kind of buffer zone in between the alpha quadrant and the dominion/borg though, if possible.

http://www.ucip.org/science/newmaps/

All the race images are on sharepoint - if the images are blurry or grainy, it's likely they are the ONLY known/useable images of that race. Many of the races have only ever appeared once in all of Trek. If the image quality is poor in that episode, it doesn't matter how much you sharpen the image. You'll always end up with an authentic TOS effect.

...

Outremer, i'd definitely put in a buffer zone of some kind if it is possible. The Borg and the Dominion will have huge empires and fleets - but will be in areas relatively devoid of life in which they can expand but not gain battle experience.

This is one of the main parts of the game really - the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians will frequently be at war with each other, limiting the size of their fleets. But this will give them battle-hardened ships that can operate much more efficently and effectively whether alone or in groups. They will recharge faster, repair faster, and will generally fare better in long drawn-out battles.

The Dominion on the other hand will rely on intimidation through sheer numbers and pure firepower to overwhelm their opponents. Their ships will be cannonfodder for the other races, and will excel at performing all-out blitz attacks, but won't last long in long drawn-out battles. As the Ferengi said in BOTF, superior numbers are just as effective as superior technology...

You can also potentially think of other ways to limit the wormhole. If we are talking about a canon map, then I'm sure the AI could be programmed such that the Dominion never finds (one of the links of maps shows the wormhole quite far from the main Dominion presense), or at least never uses the wormhole, until one of the major races from the other side comes through.

And as for the alpha/beta quadrant major races I'm talking about, perhaps going through the wormhole could be limited techonologically, by some minimum of certain tech trees and/or special research. That way, when they do come through and alert the Dominion, technologically both should be somewhat balanced. Also, the Dominion in DS9 wasn't overtly hostile at first - if you leave us alone, we leave you alone sort of thing - they only really started paying attention when the Federation etc starting gaining influence and establishing colonies.

Just wanted to canvas everyone's opinion about something. The map's going well (when i find time to do it). The biggest question i have at the minute is how dense do people want this map to be? I ask because it's starting to fill up. I'm just working on the alpha/beta quadrant at the minute and I've probably put around 200-300 star systems down already. I'd expect that number to double before that half of the map is complete.

Can the game support that many systems? I know that when i run a huge/dense/irregular game of supremacy, there aren't nearly as many stars as closely packed together as there are on the map I'm putting together, but then again for my money I'd prefer them to be closer together.

Anyway, I'm getting to the point where I can mark certain regions as completed so I'll start putting some images up for people to have a look at. I've had plenty of issues that you can all see once it's up, then I;ll bring them up then.

One last thing. I've included plenty of what would be considered non-canon Romulan and Klingon systems lifted from the Star Charts book (link in previous post). I've done this just to flesh out their regions simply because there aren't enough mentioned in canon to substatially fill up their regions of space (klingon empire's pretty sparse as it its). Does anyone mind the inclusion of these systems?

I think a Huge galaxy in Supremacy has well over 1,000-2,000 star systems, so I wouldn't worry too much about the size . As for the density, if it turns out that things are too densely packed, I can probably write an algorithm to space them out better .

I just loaded up a huge map, Mike. There are 80x80 squares - which is 6400 systems, or 1600 systems per Quadrant.

...I think that should be plenty.

@matress: Yes, but only a fraction of those total sectors are occupied by a star system. For a dense galaxy, that fraction is at most 1/8, for a total of 800 systems or less. So I guess my estimate of 1,000-2,000 was a bit off . There's no limit to the number of stars that the game can handle, but I don't recommend playng such a large map in multiplayer.

hell even a single player might be nasty start to imagine the amount of shipsrequired to hold an 300 world empire

Great Lord D

the only way I could imagine how to handle such big worlds would be a multiplayer LAN and all would work on one race's side, i.e. e.g. 5 players connected via LAN and playing the feds against the 4 other computer players sharing the work that's necessary to manage 300 star systems (later on; at the beginning it's very little to do for the other 4 lan-connected "helpers"). That would require to change the netcode to either a "master/slaves"-mode or a team edit mode where the latter would be a lot of work I guess. The master/slaves-one with a merging of the separate input data (changes only with regards to last turn) via a "priority list" of the 5 players would require only slight changes to the code I assume plus the fast ethernet connectivity via LAN makes the game playable, at least the send time to host server is not a problem then.

I've made this proposal some time ago at our boards, will see if that gets in the game(s)..

...So basically we need to merge Allegiance into Supremacy.

From the sounds of it yes.

Great Lord D

That would be awesome! My friends and I would love that. They had a similar thing in Starcraft where 2-3 people could be on the same team, each as a different race, but at the same starting location and shared resources. I wonder if it would be possible to implement it so that people on a LAN can choose to be one of the minor races? and just join the Klingon's or whoever and still keep their own race fleet/abilities or be able to build Klingon stuff now.

I certainly hope that people will be able to rely on a good system manager. Come to think of it, going a step further and creating a full blown empire manager might not be a bad idea. Essentially, the empire manager would adjust the build priorities empire wide based on parameters the player sets such as how much emphasis would be placed on ship building vs research. Though one important thing that the manager would need to be able to do is to determine, based on the information about each systems such as research potential and ship building potential, just what systems should be assigned to do what.

The eventual hierarchy would looks something like this:

1. human player
2. empire manager
* resource manager?
* military manager? for controlling things like automated scouts or patrol vessels
3. system manager

The hierarchial AI will probably look something like this:

• Civilization AI or Human Player
  • Diplomacy AI or Human Player
    • Individual diplomats for every other Civilization or Human Player
  • Fleet Admiral AI or Human Player
    • Fleet Commander AIs for each Task Force or Human Player (Automation Available)
  • Territorial Oversight and Expansion AI or Human Player
    • System Viceroy AIs for each Colony or Human Player (Automation Available)
  • Intelligence AI or Human Player
    • Internal Security AI or Human Player (Automation Available)
    • Spymaster AIs or Human Player (Automation Available)

In otherwords, people would have the option of giving complete control of their empires over to the computer and can sit back as just a spectator if they want?

Not quite. They can only yield control where I put "Automation Available" in parenthesis.

What kind of Fleet AI are we talking about? And are there going to be waypoints? I remember how frustrated I got from having my ships fly right into black holes in BotF. And patrol routes for scout ships would make patroling neutral zones much easier than manually doing it each turn.