here's a random number sequence for you
9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9 ...
let us know when you understand it.
9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9, 9 ...
let us know when you understand it.
The spread of the empires is horrible
- Thread starter The_Human_Oddity
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It is not relevant. Pseudo randomness is not relevant. If you were using dices, orangutans or whatever method you would observe such groupings.
Out of 3 dice throw sequence which pne is most probable that was done by dices not I wrote them arbitrarily:
A 1 6 2 5 3 4
B 6 5 4 3 2 1
C 1 2 2 4 6 4
Yup, random placement inevitably causes clustering. I love this video here because it demonstrates it so well. Obviously it's in Norwegian, but he first tells people to place rubber duckies randomly, and then demonstrates true randomness
.Edit: actually I feel that distribution is pretty cool. I'd like to play that galaxy map.
Edit 2: to be more constructive, I agree there should be an "evenly distributed" option that forced all empires to be about the same distance apart from each other.
They do for multi-player games: Distributed Players. I've found that it works best with elliptical galaxies.
Well, I can understand they did not in solo, evenly spread doesn't work well with AIs because they tend to get same territory hence same power and not daring to attack which makes for dull games.
On my side I loaded a hell lot of new games to study game generator behavior a bit with observe command, and patterns are obvious as ****. Placements, multi-planet systems within colonization range, zro or neutronium within colonization range, all have a coming back through multiple game generations that is far too regular. I became able to tell when I was about to spawn south around a gas giant. And if you do spawn around a gas giant and load a new game, you will again be around one 99%.
On the screen OP posted, even if there's too few empires, you can see the traditionnal "home alone" south-east, and in the middle there's the mandatory "siamese brothers". In fact the random setting just increases the chances for a "home alone", while risking up to 5 heads hydra cluster.
Because these are rows of fixed parameters randomly chosen to make a column. This is semi-random and while it's necessary to maintain balance, it can seem fake if there's too few parameters. During my endless new game spree I ultimately waited for the "zro within borders and neutronium near (or reverse) with military incentive on the latter" spawn. It occurs every 20-30 generations or so. With a bit of patience you can get it combined with "home alone".
All of this is fine and has to be, but the thing that is striking me is :
You can be "home alone", but if you don't and number of empire is decent, and you don't go to war, your capital gotta be a frontier town. That makes feel boxed in from the start, and I think this is why people want these non clustered starts (that AIs handle horribly IMHO). Since having war incentive early is fine and having 1/8th of galaxy out of the box for self also is, a middle ground between the two could be nice in 1/3rd of the new game generation results. Or at least maybe an option for guaranteeing that bit more space people seem to crave.
EDIT : TLDR; When you make a macaroni, you randomly put pasta in the plate and you get macaroni no matter what. Randomness effect is limited. Same here. Randomness constrained too much.
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I think what OP wants (and what we have in the form of mods) is an option other than "all empires smooshed together like some sort of erotic mosh pit" and "just, like, wherever man".
I'd really like an option to have empires evenly spaced. I like a little bit of breathing room so I can expand at least a bit before I have to wrangle over planets with the AI. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
But it seems that even when the distribution is set to "random", the onlything that changes is "pick a random side of the galaxy to smoosh empires in". I've spent an entire afternoon of restarting games and using the observe command and the result was always the same: the game will actively try to stuff many empires together in close proximity. The only difference for "random" seems to be that sometimes you get to be on the outer rim of the resulting blob.
This is regardless of how many empires you generate, by the way. It's not a matter of there not being enough space.
Even when only generating a hand full of empires, they still somehow end up mostly closely spaced, even in 1000 star empires. That means "random" placement isn't random or even pseudo random, there has to be some sort of modifier that prioritises having them close together for that early game pressure.
I'd really like an option to have empires evenly spaced. I like a little bit of breathing room so I can expand at least a bit before I have to wrangle over planets with the AI. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
But it seems that even when the distribution is set to "random", the onlything that changes is "pick a random side of the galaxy to smoosh empires in". I've spent an entire afternoon of restarting games and using the observe command and the result was always the same: the game will actively try to stuff many empires together in close proximity. The only difference for "random" seems to be that sometimes you get to be on the outer rim of the resulting blob.
This is regardless of how many empires you generate, by the way. It's not a matter of there not being enough space.
Even when only generating a hand full of empires, they still somehow end up mostly closely spaced, even in 1000 star empires. That means "random" placement isn't random or even pseudo random, there has to be some sort of modifier that prioritises having them close together for that early game pressure.
Looks pretty random to me.
Random Distributions =/= Uniform Distributions. Kinda by definition.
Maybe you're thinking of the fact that the average of a sufficiently-large set of random distributions would be a uniform distribution. But each individual distribution in that set would still be random.
Random Distributions =/= Uniform Distributions. Kinda by definition.
Maybe you're thinking of the fact that the average of a sufficiently-large set of random distributions would be a uniform distribution. But each individual distribution in that set would still be random.
It might be related to the "birthday paradox" now I think about it.
Say you break the galaxy up into 16 wedges and roll randomly for which wedge each start is in - with all the rolls random and blind to each other.
With 2 starts, you've got a 1/16 chance of them being in the same wedge, and a 2/16 chance of them being in nighbouring wedges. That means that in 3/16 starts of this setup, the starts are "near" each other.
With 3 starts, you've got a 1/16 chance of the second start spawning in the same wedge as the first - and if that doesn't happen, you've got a 1/8 chance of the third spawning in the same wedge as either of the first two. It's only a 1/256 chance of all three being in the same wedge.
Say you break the galaxy up into 16 wedges and roll randomly for which wedge each start is in - with all the rolls random and blind to each other.
With 2 starts, you've got a 1/16 chance of them being in the same wedge, and a 2/16 chance of them being in nighbouring wedges. That means that in 3/16 starts of this setup, the starts are "near" each other.
With 3 starts, you've got a 1/16 chance of the second start spawning in the same wedge as the first - and if that doesn't happen, you've got a 1/8 chance of the third spawning in the same wedge as either of the first two. It's only a 1/256 chance of all three being in the same wedge.