After i have just play a lot with the map generation i found the following things would be very nice to be added to ES.



N-Arm Galaxy instead of 8 Arm

With 2-3 and 5-7 players in the 8 arm galaxy on every galaxy size you can have some very unfair things of the follow:



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Some players have direct conflict others are separated and protected by wormholes - it does not matter if you set for little or a lot of wormholes.

Some players get 2 planets in their wormhole split part of the galaxy others got 6. This seems really unfair because it is a huge set back when you have to start there, altough i tried to use the perfect distribution but it seems this happens because some constellations seem to fall together (i am not sure if this is really possible but this is how it feels)

8 arm + tiny seems to produce pretty awkard results. With small and above the galaxy generation seems to work much better.

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Obviously the map generations works very well with "a lot of constellations", "high galaxy density". If you choose perfect or average distributed system does not seem to have a huge impact. Even extreme settings like 2p on a huge 8 arm/4 arm galaxy seem to produce near perfect results. As long as the player number is a factor of the number of arms or vice versa. If you start to place 3 players in a 2/4/8 arm galaxy it begins to become awkard.



Therefore i think there should be a n-arm option which follows the same principle as the other spirals but just uses the number of players as number of arms. With 1 central constellation and each arm connected through a wormhole you would have a galaxy setting that works fair for 2-8 players.



If you play against bots this is usually unimportant because just choose the proper amount of bots but if you play with real life friends you sometimes just have 3,5,6,7 people and can not find a very nice galaxy setup that easily. Also for new players there should be a recommendation which settings work. I have no problem just trying most of the settings with the amoebia to find out what works but a new player starts the game, begins it and maybe thinks "oh the map generation is totally broken and unfair" - besides it isnt.



Map information

The Shape information from http://endlessspace.wikia.com/wiki/Galaxy_settings should be directly in the game because actually this is really important. There is no reason not to exactly display to a player how many stars will be generated, how many connections a star will have on average etc.