It doesn't. Sectors aren't actually prebuilt, they're generated from colony placement.
One side effect of this is that you can (sometimes) manipulate how the sector lays out if you micromanage your expansion to exploit the algorithm in question.
Constellations
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It doesn't. Sectors aren't actually prebuilt, they're generated from colony placement.
One side effect of this is that you can (sometimes) manipulate how the sector lays out if you micromanage your expansion to exploit the algorithm in question.
The game already generates clusters of stars. If I remember correctly, one of the things this is used for is the creation process of the hyperlane network. If one sector equals one cluster, then this would just basically mean, that they visualise the clusters, and give them some more mechanics. So theoretically speaking, this shouldn't be as much a problem.
On all settings, including max hyperlane density (ie. "the bone they threw at people who wanted warp")?
Even putting that aside: it's a bit harder to see since 2.1 hid the map (at least until you've done enough exploration and contacts to reveal it) but the clusters aren't entirely consistent.
Setting aside that I dislike it when people refer to clusters as constellations, I believe that originally when making 2.2 they did set it up so that each cluster was a sector. They changed it during development because it apparently didn't feel good.
What I would do is make sectors player-definable again and make a limit similar to fleet-cap that determines how many systems/planets are able to be placed in a single sector.
That said, I don't mind how it works now with the 3 system thing. But it would be nice if you could still create a sector manually from a given system. As it is whether or not a group of planets end up in the same sector depends in part on the order in which you colonise/conquer them which feels wonky to me. It does add another little benefit to habitats, though (using them to determine the origin point for a sector).
What I would do is make sectors player-definable again and make a limit similar to fleet-cap that determines how many systems/planets are able to be placed in a single sector.
That said, I don't mind how it works now with the 3 system thing. But it would be nice if you could still create a sector manually from a given system. As it is whether or not a group of planets end up in the same sector depends in part on the order in which you colonise/conquer them which feels wonky to me. It does add another little benefit to habitats, though (using them to determine the origin point for a sector).
As far as I know yes. I believe, that they wrote in a dev diary, that they use clusters, to better determine where chokepoints in the network should be. The density slider does nothing more, than setting a multiplier to increase the total hyperlane count per system. Also, it would be very unusuall if they used different code for different settings of a slider.
I never said that this wouldn't need some tweaking. Today clusters are only used to create several other things, as far as I know they use them also to determine where certain space creatures are, and I believe it also plays into which systems can have an anomaly that is part of a certain precursor event chain. So, at the moment, inconsistencies in cluster generation aren't such a big deal. It may need some tweaking, to make sure that every system that is part of a cluster is directly connected to the rest of the cluster. But if we could claim whole sectors (aka clusters), it would make sense to have a few systems that are only accesible from other clusters. Otherwise you would just have to block the chokepoints to effectively own a sector. Regardless, I think the important part is, that the sector layout is sensible. Actually, anything is better than the but load of one planet sectors we have now.
That would still be problematic, since this would mean that, with low hab-settings there would still be many one planet sectors, and with higher settings, there would be quit a lot of habitable planets in a sector, so I am not sure this would be much of a solution, other than a "cosmetical fix for some ugly sectors".
It is worse than that. I play with a private mod that makes sectors bigger. It seems, the game is unable to delete sectors that are empty, or shouldn't exist anymore.
If you conquer a colonised system, the game seems to try to let this system stay in the sector it previously was. You can easily see that by playing a Fanatic Purifier and use (or make a mod) with asynchronic sector sizes (6x for core sectors and 4x for frontier sectors) and then go and conquer an empire that is within reach of your core sector (make sure to only land armies, after you conquered all of the outposts). I always try to conquer colonised systems in a certain order, to have a more logic sector layout when I'm playing as a Fanatic Purifier, and I often see that colonised systems are part of sectors they shouldn't be. Only a few weeks ago I conquered a direct neighbor, and all but one system were part of my core sector, only their capital was in its own sector, complety surounded by my core sector. After I reloaded that game the next day, the sector was still there, but had no planet in it, since the system that previously was part of it was now part of my core sector. I also had the phenomenon that a colonised system, that should have been part of an existing sector, was in its own sector, completly destroying the layout I had estimated.
Max density has no chokepoints or visible clusters. It's about as close to the old warp experience as you can get anymore (though, it lacks even the euclidian clusters you could get pre 2.0.) They might still have the 'clusters' being built during mapgen and just rendered invisible by the 'full density,' but...
Meh. Personal opinion, but I feel map-defined sectors are just terrible in general. Much like eliminating warp drive, I get why they did it but I still hate it.
What I *don't* get is this: the layout you're describing is pretty much what I thought the dev diaries and twitter teases were implying we were going to get. So why didn't they do it that way in the first place?
And the only answers I can come up with is that it either wasn't feasible to work it in with the mapgen code for some reason, or the potential of splitting sectors (when you and a rival empire both get part of a cluster) created other problems.
I think there is a console command to show clusters, I've never used it though.
Yeah, it is what we all thought we would get, because it basically is the system they described in a dev diary. But I have no idea, what-so-ever, why they walked away from that. Could've been technical issues, could've been not enough time, could've been that this design didn't work out at all.
I never saw an official statement from them, so your guess is as good as mine.
However, I think they had a good reason when they decided to take away the manual sector creation. The old system was to easy to exploit, and gave no reason what-so-ever to not create a super sized sector. On the other hand the current sectors don't add anything to the game, they could've trashed the whole thing and instead have designed it so that every colony has a govenor and nothing would really change. So what ever they do, they have to give sectors a reason to exist, otherwise they are nothing more than a virtual conglomerate of systems, that does nothing more than looking pretty on your galaxy map.