Will Thibault
United States
Michigan
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Long and short of it - I find the photo system here maddening. If I make a mistake on one of my maps - and I'm bound to! - I can't replace it and it'll get rejected for being too similar. Ah well, I was already coding my own site anyways.
Here's a link.
I included slightly updated versions of the Antiquity maps I posted previously to the image system, as well as a map I just did up tonight - Distortion, the 5-galaxy 4-player monstrosity!
I've been - slowly - running up a tutorial for how I make these. I figured someone would find it edifying. Since it's still undergoing work - I want it to be thorough - here's the short version;
• Pick a number of players and grab the amount of empty tiles prescribed by the rules. You can choose to take the random discards from that number, or count it against your standard hexes.
• Decide on a theme and a galaxy shape.
• Lay down Mecatol Rex and one face-down Home System for each player, in the positions you'd like them to occupy. Put in special systems so that each player takes the same number of moves to get to Rex or adjacent players - I like Supernovas and Nebulas, personally.
• Lay down wormholes, including Lodor and Quann and any tokens you want to use. Here you'll try and equalize a player's "spread". The idea is to make each player roughly as close to any particular hex as any other player, within 1 movement space if possible.
• Now lay down empty tiles around starting positions that aren't on an edge, to account for the impassable edges. You don't want to double a starting position's resources because you forgot about that.
• Lay down standard hexes adjacent to starting positions. Make sure each starting position has the same number of resources adjacent to it. I count tech specialties as a resource, but not anything else (I do count Mirage as a 2-resource planet because of how useful fighters are for screening, though).
• Fill in open spaces. The more starting positions that are within a certain number of steps of a space, the more that space should be worth. That way, you can put a really valuable hex right where everyone can look and think "Yeah, I can reach that." That way people fight over 'em.
• Finally, pop down Artifacts if you use 'em. Typically, I put one on Rex and the Nexus, then spread the rest out between stuff far from Rex (but between multiple players anyways) and stuff directly adjacent. I tend to put artifacts on the least valuable planet in a system, if there're more than one.
That's the basics. I'll cover that in more detail when I have the full with-pictures tutorial finished; I even go over how to set up Vassal for making screencaps.
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Magic Octopus
Finland
Tampere
"...that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the the field of battle - victorious."
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Cool stuff!
You say that you don't know how SA values hexes. I guess SA values them like you do, but SA maps are not supposed to be balanced/identical in terms of resources and/or influece or other factors. Some have more resources, others more influence, some are easily defended, some are closer to Mecatol etc. The idea is that the players determine the starting locations via the bidding mechanism. The value of each stating position is different for each player, depending on their race and their Secret Objective.
I like the idea of the Antiquity maps. It's cool to have those balanced maps, escpecially for new players, who cannot really determine the value of different systems or starting positions. Also, with balanced maps you might be able to assign the starting positions randomly, and save some time. Also it's much more fun to avoid the regular "pie slice" galaxies, and place the juiciest systems in contested areas.
For my taste, you might have a bit too many resources, though. I feel that austerity creates conflict, especially if there are awesome systems in reach of more than one player.
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Rich Shipley
United States
Baltimore
Maryland
the liberal unsavory type
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Sounds like the files section might be better for something like this. It handles versions much better.
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Scott Lewis
United States
Thornton
Colorado
NFHS Football & Basketball
Dread Our Coming, Suffer Our Presence, Embrace Our Glory (Solonavi War Cry)
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rshipley wrote: Sounds like the files section might be better for something like this. It handles versions much better.
Also, you can add (and remove, I believe) photos to your own personal gallery; you won't get any  for it, but there's no worry about things being rejected as too similar.
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Will Thibault
United States
Michigan
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magicoctopus wrote: Cool stuff!
You say that you don't know how SA values hexes. I guess SA values them like you do, but SA maps are not supposed to be balanced/identical in terms of resources and/or influece or other factors. Some have more resources, others more influence, some are easily defended, some are closer to Mecatol etc. The idea is that the players determine the starting locations via the bidding mechanism. The value of each stating position is different for each player, depending on their race and their Secret Objective.
Yeah, that's what I figured. My next few maps I'm going to try for less symmetry and either have bonus TG in weaker starting positions or require bidding as in SA.
magicoctopus wrote: For my taste, you might have a bit too many resources, though. I feel that austerity creates conflict, especially if there are awesome systems in reach of more than one player.
With Distortion, I intentionally ran down the amount of resources relative to Antiquity. There are both less valuable and fewer planetary systems, except those locations that I felt needed more to create conflict - namely, the far ends of the bottom two galaxies and adjacent to Rex.
Everyone else; I wasn't aware of the Personal Galleries - thanks for the pointer. Still, I've got my own site, might as well use it.
EDIT: Sparsing down Antiquity shouldn't be too hard. I'll try my hand at it tonight.
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Will Thibault
United States
Michigan
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Here're updated "Sparse" versions of Antiquity. This time, I also made an effort to maintain the same layout except where necessary to make room for different numbers of players.
4-Player
5-Player
6-Player
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