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MOO2 Fair and Balanced Galaxy Generator

Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2012 8:17 pm
by hellcatv
Hi folks
The information on these forums has been super helpful in my quest to make a fair master of orion save game for multiplayer.

I did a test with a friend, where we both loaded the same Savegame and used the same tactics, but one of us volunteered not to colonize a rich planet as our 3rd colony (including home)
This resulted in a over 20% difference in final score!

And it was reproduceable. The galaxy generation can cause the balance of the game to hugely favor one player over another without that player being significantly better.
This would be ok for many short games, but since games are so long, I decided it was time to tackle the problem with technology.

I built a savegame editor that modifies the galaxy to be exactly reflected on all quadrants (for 4 players) or halves (for 2)
This means that everyone has the same opportunity in the early game.

hopefully it's interesting to y'all

https://github.com/danielrh/masteroforion2

I'd love feedback or if it helped y'all have fun.

Posted: Sat Dec 01, 2012 10:26 pm
by Catalyst_Kh
Very nice job Hellcatv! It would be ideal to make dos exe file with /? parameter showing all command line options. So it could be used in semiautomatic mode inside dosbox, like mapgen.exe is used now. For example, generic starting bat file for multiplayer host player now is like:
VDCGM2 /skipintro /minstart /planets=5 /monsters=0 /nosplint /noorion /nonebula /nowh /nobh /noreport
cryogen
mapgen -t toxic -t upoor -t fixedhw -t gaia -f SAVE10.GAM
VDCGM2 /skipintro /minstart /planets=5 /monsters=0 /nosplint /noorion /nonebula /nowh /nobh /noreport

Thus, after starting new MP game host player just need to quit moo2 at turn 0 and it will instantly run again with corrected save file, so the player just needs to click several times inside moo2 to host the game again from corrected save. Editing saves manually each time is so grievous...