Matrix Games Forums

I hate, Hate, having my home system right at the edge of the map, or right in the middle. The perfect starting spot for me is somewhere in an area of 16 specific grid spots. c3-c4-d3-d4 in the upper left quadrant, g3-g4-h3-h4 in the upper right, c7-c8-d7-d9 in the lower left, and g7-g8-h7-h8 in the lower right. This gives one 4th of the galaxy as my little backyard. It ensures that my home system is at the rough center of my empire.

And while it's nice to have the option for starting of having the edge or the middle, I still find myself starting and restarting repeatedly each time I start a new game until my home system is in one of those "perfect" grid coordinates. It can take 15 or 20 restarts before I hit one.


I would like to see an option in the starting options to choose your starting grid location more precisely. Not a big deal since you spend far more time actually playing then doing the startup dance, but it would be a nice option for people like me who want a specific starting location.

Thanks for reading.

While I agree in principle that it would be nice to tune the location of starts a bit, I think you might benefit from getting a little extra flexibility in your start locations. Expansion is always so dynamic anyway, you never know which direction your will be expanding, regardless of start location.

I don't like middlestarts myself, but edge starts are great for me.

That inner - middle - outer core setting thing seems to work pretty well. Plus set it to "sweet-luscious" (or very good or whatever it is) starting location and you should get a pretty good starting location.

The one thing I wish the game had was a setting with virtually ZERO starting space infrastructure, i.e., most all species had either just discovered interstellar travel technology else they were still a ways off from discovering it. Even with the advancement setting on lowest you still start out with some extra-solar stuff, a gas mine or something.

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid

That inner - middle - outer core setting thing seems to work pretty well. Plus set it to "sweet-luscious" (or very good or whatever it is) starting location and you should get a pretty good starting location.

The spacing controls for the starting locations of other empires is a bit buggered, too: The empires don't space themselves out from each OTHER, so if you choose "Distant" for more than one or two of them, they will all end up jammed into one corner of the map. For instance, a nice game would be, say, an ellipse, with the other empires distributed around the outer rim with you in the Core as Monkey In The Middle, and this is what you'd expect from choosing "distant", but instead, the game will just jam everyone in one corner of the map, which makes for a kind of lame game.

The one thing I wish the game had was a setting with virtually ZERO starting space infrastructure, i.e., most all species had either just discovered interstellar travel technology else they were still a ways off from discovering it. Even with the advancement setting on lowest you still start out with some extra-solar stuff, a gas mine or something.

The extra-solar mines are necessary: Your homeworld doesn't contain all the resources needed to build your basic starting ships, so if you didn't have any mines, you would not be able to build anything because you would have no access to the resources required to do so!

Perhaps the algoritims need to be refined in this respect? I have also noticed that empires tend to clutter at places, while you have the default option for the galaxy settings on.

Middle starts seem to be the most fun; earlier contact and messy colonization. But I'd like 'em all, preferring random starts best though.

Yeah, the starting position algorithm seem to need some work. Put everyone on far or medium and they start at more or less the same place. Set all to random, and I've ended up with sharing my starting system with two other empires

When I started my current game, the principal factor was starting location.

I kept restarting untill I got what I wanted: A5 sector.