Playing on disk shape, 5players, i always start at the top left of the galaxy. I always have slot2 player as Cravers, slot3 Horatio, slot4 Hissho, slot5 Sophon, out of habbit to have all the races.

My neighbor to the left is always Sophons and to my right, Hissho. Cravers bottom right, Horatio bottom left.



Checking other maps, i created about 10 spiral-2 games, always started at the top left. Spiral-4 games, always started on the north-east arm.



Something changed in alpha2, because i do remember in alpha1, a 2-spiral game where i started at the bottom right.

Race doesnt matter, it seems the Player slot and AI slots are all locked into certain start locations.



Anyone else finding the same?

In my opinion they start all to close too. Thinking big map big empire but I usually need to fight my self out from a corner. The Empire most far from me end up with most area to expand.

steamapps/common/endless space/Public/GalaxyGenerator/Regions





~ try changing your colour, and see if your start position changes.

Although I suppose the maps are symmetric, it should not be too hard to fix this. The player slot should be randomized among all the regions. I prefer not knowing which direction I can find the other races in, until I actually explore.

Definitely needs to be better randomized. The huge galaxies also don't seem, well HUGE enough for me. More space between empires definitively seems the way to go. As is, it's like your just fighting bigger quick matches with room to accommodate more Empires and the larger space and enemies just causes the turns to increase proportionately. I just don't get the sense of scale that says galaxy. The felling that I DO get is that of an arena just sometimes a big ass arena. SotS 3D star charts really give you the sense of scale along with the greater star count.

davea wrote:
Although I suppose the maps are symmetric, it should not be too hard to fix this. The player slot should be randomized among all the regions. I prefer not knowing which direction I can find the other races in, until I actually explore.

I agree thoroughly and I also agree that the AI's are too close for comfort

craigbic wrote:
I agree thoroughly and I also agree that the AI's are too close for comfort

That, you can control with map generation options. I like a game where I can build up a *little* and then go attack *something*. So these settings work well for me. If you want to hide off in a corner by yourself for a while () then you can make the map size slightly larger, and the number of empires slightly less.

Confirmed, I also found there is no random player placement in the galaxy if you re-create a game with the same criteria. Maybe there is a way to enable this?

Gargomaxthalus wrote:
Definitely needs to be better randomized. The huge galaxies also don't seem, well HUGE enough for me. More space between empires definitively seems the way to go. As is, it's like your just fighting bigger quick matches with room to accommodate more Empires and the larger space and enemies just causes the turns to increase proportionately. I just don't get the sense of scale that says galaxy. The felling that I DO get is that of an arena just sometimes a big ass arena. SotS 3D star charts really give you the sense of scale along with the greater star count.

You read my mind. The galaxy of Endless Space doesn't seem very "endless." I know some people are happy with the galaxy size, but quite frankly I like the idea of having thousands of planets in a galaxy, and having an empire stretching over hundreds of planets engaging in war against another hundreds-of-planets empire.



Though if nothing else, we could one day have this with mods.

The dev team has posted somewhere that in the final release, each size will have twice as many stars. Also, I encourage you to look into the modding thread. Just about the only thing that is moddable so far is the galaxy generation, since that is in an xml file. It is highly likely that you can change the number of stars by changing the xml.

I always seem to start very close to opponents. Unless I have isolated systems, this usually comes into play with destroyed colony ships, bad starting diplomacy with races, etc.



I wish the starting spawns were further away. It would be much better if I didn't meet other races until 10-20 turns later. Maybe increasing the distances between stars would help...

I wouldn't mid a galaxy that was the Milky Way. There are no Barred Spirals in the galaxy options. Hell, would be cool to have The Milky Way as one. 2 armed, Barred Spiral with the spur arm offshoots. With the Humans starting in the location we actually are. And a Barred Spiral would lend itself very well to wormhole separation. Tho it lacks the spur arms our galaxy has (Orion Spur and others) NGC 1300 is a classic Barred Spiral example, if you want to see what I'm talking about. Happen to have a poster of it on my wall, is why it came to mind so easy, just have to look up and right to see it. :}

Gargomaxthalus wrote:
Definitely needs to be better randomized. The huge galaxies also don't seem, well HUGE enough for me. More space between empires definitively seems the way to go. As is, it's like your just fighting bigger quick matches with room to accommodate more Empires and the larger space and enemies just causes the turns to increase proportionately. I just don't get the sense of scale that says galaxy. The felling that I DO get is that of an arena just sometimes a big ass arena. SotS 3D star charts really give you the sense of scale along with the greater star count.

This. I am really tired of playng huge maps and encountering another AI in the first 10 turns

Well how many AI are you playing with and what map type? I have been doing the spiral 8 with 8 AI and because wormholes connect to the galatic core I have yet to see them for awhile like 20 to 30 turns

Henzington wrote:
Well how many AI are you playing with and what map type? I have been doing the spiral 8 with 8 AI and because wormholes connect to the galatic core I have yet to see them for awhile like 20 to 30 turns

Well of course 4 AI as there are only 5 races and 8-spiral. In 99% my first encounter are Cravers in the first 10-20 turns. It is really tiresome to see the same AI every time as the first one.

K1ller wrote:
Well of course 4 AI as there are only 5 races and 8-spiral. In 99% my first encounter are Cravers in the first 10-20 turns. It is really tiresome to see the same AI every time as the first one.

Why "of course" 4 AI? just cause there are 5 factions, doesn't mean you can't have them repeating. Can start 8.