Stellar Divide

I'll try it if you put it up on the internet.

Psst, its up already. Theres even a linkie!

Oh, well then... guess I'll get it

huh, the only complaint I have is that it would appear assassinating the HW would be too easy...

Plus there are no crystal worlds to fight over, but she looks good. Will check it out.

You have to fight through the asteroid first... But yes, it is "easy" to knock out a player.

yeah... it deffinitly looks good, but like said. It seems rather then having to fight through all a players worlds to get to the "heart" of his empire, you kinda run right into his empires cap. with all his other planets protected behind his most valued planet. but then maybe that was the idea I look forwerd to an interesting game! good work   

looks just ok

That is pretty much the idea. You have to control the sun -- because its the one system that controls access to everyones empire -- but you also have to fortify heavily, because if the enemy catches you napping, the game is going to end soon.

Which, in a sense, is the point: this map isn't going to be conducive to long, drawn out games where things go back and forth, its going to be (reasonably) quick, because once a player is out he's out (unless rescued by allies...).

I suppose the only issue I can see with putting your homeworld pretty much in front is that you really need to use your flagship to fight off the militia quickly. On usual maps, this at least puts your flagship in the path of a potential incoming attack. Here, you'd have to fly several jumps (wiping out all your antimatter in the process) while the enemy could already be wiping out your shipyards and essentially ending the game.

This would be an issue in early game only, when everyone's scrambling to colonize. You can't really send just your cobalts/skirms to take on the militia because you'll keep losing lots of them, and you can't send just your flagship and leave the frigates up front, because with the enemy flagship they'll get wasted..

So it's kind of a catch 22. You can't control the sun that early in the game, and you basically take a gamble. You can lose pretty much either way. If you use your flagship to colonize, they can attack and easily wipe out everything on your most improtant planet early. If you don't, you'll spend lots of money on frigates to take out the militia and it'll go much slower, while the enemy could've gambled on using their flagship and didn't get attacked, so now he's got a big advantage.

Just seems like there's too much gambling That, and teams on this map will probably just all join up and hit one guy at a time, knocking out their home planet and moving on to the next. And most of the action will have to happen at the star, which pretty much eliminates any strategy

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if they attack your homeworld that early aren't they failing to colonize themselves?

On top of that, don't forget that a single scout stationed at the star (with attack turned off) would give you ages of warning before anyone got near your homeworld.

Star -> asteroid -> homeworld Vs (at most!) asteroid -> asteroid -> homeworld.

It should take a (reasonably long) time to go through the star, adding to that aspect of the defense. Yes, its going to weaken the defenders anti-matter reserve, but on the other hand you've got multiple colonized worlds and your foe probably doesn't.

Edit: BTW, I am considering an incremental upgrade to V 1.1... having played it last night, I'm probabyl going to end up moving all the planetary "clusters" outward from the star, but each players territory would stay internally the same.

Yeah, it's a gamble too, but if nobody attacks them at the same time they basically wipe you out and meanwhile they can still put out some frigates to colonize the asteroids at least.

The point about the scout is valid for team games, if you play FFA you just don't know where they're headed until they basically jump. Even in team games, it's hard to tell where they're going until they're mostly through the sun's grav well and you can tell about which angle they'd jump at

OK, so just research PSIDAR ASAP

Edit:

Oh, and btw... just for kicks I played 7 on 1 in an AI game. I'll be darned if the AI wasn't winning when bed time rolled around!

Which only works when they actually jump As far as I've been able to figure out, Psidar just shows you traffic for either the 1 or 2 jump distance? So, say, if someone just jumps into a neutral planet, and clicky to attack yours next door, you're not going to get notification then, only when they actually jump.

But, this is all theorycraft anyway, the map needs playtesting to see if all this is even a big issue in practice, or not Many things turn out to be quite different in practice than on paper.