Seeding of faction start sites

[DilithiumDad]

Faction seeding seems to be everyone's pet peeve. Most people play random maps, and more often than not you will find your HQ is only 10 tiles from Sparta Command on a tiny island. We all have stories of ridiculously good and ridiculously bad start sites.

How does this happen? From experimenting with different maps, I have made some observations. First thing I noticed was that the Map of Planet gave much more predictable start sites than random maps. There are about 9 common sites and 4 others that crop up less often (Isle of Deinaria, for example). I noticed that if I added more land more resources (monoliths, specials) at those seldom-used start sites, they would be used more often. If I went overboard, though, and added too many goodies, the seeding routine would avoid that super-start like the plague.

So, it seems that the seeding algorhythm first tries to find 7 equal start sites, defined roughly as 10 X 10-tile areas on a huge map. These regions must be roughly equal in terms of the total nutrients/minerals/energy available without terraforming. If an area is short of resources or area, extra unity pods are given. If one faction starts on a small island whereas the others get more space, the islanders will get a unity foil. (If all factions start on islands, though, no one gets a foil!)

On random maps, the seeding algorhythm has a hard time balancing sites. This is especially true with low cloud cover, which reduces avialable resources. Map size also has a big effect, as does %ocean (Sea tiles seem not be involved in calculating start sites)

All this applies only to SMAC --have not tested SMACX as carefully (I presume that sea tiles are considered in settting the Pirates start site, although maybe not!)

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Creator of the Ultimate Builder Map, based on the Huge Map of Planet

[DilithiumDad]

So, if you want evenly spaced and equal start sites for 7 factions, here's the advice:

1. Use a predefined map, such as Ultimate Builder Map or Map of Planet or some of the others in Apolyton archive, such as Large Realistic Map.

2. Use as large a map as you can tolerate; Huge is best.

3. Set cloud cover to dense, and erosion to strong or average (too many rocky squres reduces resource count). Set ocean coverage to average or lower, unless you are on a huge map.

[Jasonian]

Ironically enough, after I read this thread and set up a game with those settings (which is my normal "builder" setup), I landed 8 squares away from Sparta Command. Oh well... bad luck.

On a Pirate note, I find that they start in the largest continual open ocean area on planet, right next to the shore, and often by the Monsoon Jungle. I thought this was my odd luck, but I remember other people saying they've had similar experiences.

[Misotu]

Wish I'd had the same experience. I wouldn't doubt that it's maybe the general case, but the only time I've played the Pirates on a random map was in the Apolyton tourny.

Started in deep water, surrounded by fungus, close to a *tiny* island, well away from the jungle or indeed anything useful and the closest land mass was already occupied by the Morganites ...

Needless to say, this game will not be my finest hour Course, it would have helped if I'd read the manual. Since in my experience the initial colony pod tends to land on a reasonable base site when playing any faction, I remembered that the Pirates have some capability for terraforming deep ocean squares and went ahead and founded the base. Stupid, stupid, stupid. They don't have that capability until Advanced Eco Engineering or something - anyway, around a level 7 tech. *Completely* screwed myself

[Blake]

Pirates often start in deep water, sometimes with only one or none squares of shallow water in the base radius.. it's not much of a problem if you have look first on. I strongly suspect they just get dropped onto a random water tile, altough probably avoiding bodies of water smaller than about 50 tiles.

As for pirates usually starting in the largest body of water I believe that is pure probability, the huge map of planet probably has 90-95% of the water in the main ocean, and the remaining 5-10% in the freshwater sea, if the pirates are spawned in a random open water tile that suggests 1 in 10 or 20 times you should start in the fresh water sea, I have started there once (fun game actually), and I've probably played the pirates about a dozen times.

Also (for land factions) it seems more often than not you start next to water, altough with no preference between an ocean and a single tile of water, and it seems to lock up if you start a game on a map with no water at all.