A few questions that I have

[Jarek Noschese]

Any way to stop factions from starting within <20 spaces of each other? Or even control how much solar Energy there is on Planet? Or how to control the ACTUAL gathering of Planet's land masses relative to it's oceans, so that NO faction has to start on a deserted island w/o either pods or special resources? I haven't been able to win on Librarian because of these nit picky flaws. And even on lower levels, I've only won by Conquest.

 

[Petek]

Any way to stop factions from starting within <20 spaces of each other?

You could use Dilithium Dad's Ultimte Builder map, (I added this map to the CFC downloads area because it's difficult to find.) You also could play on larger maps. See my BigSMACXMaps1 and 2.zip in the Alpha Centauri Downloads forum. If you play play SMAX (as opposed to SMAC), you should definitely use pre-made really big maps for reasons discussed in the comments for these maps.

Or even control how much solar Energy there is on Planet?

I'm not sure what you mean. Please elaborate.

Or how to control the ACTUAL gathering of Planet's land masses relative to it's oceans, so that NO faction has to start on a deserted island w/o either pods or special resources? I haven't been able to win on Librarian because of these nit picky flaws. And even on lower levels, I've only won by Conquest.

You could experiment with different values in the #WORLDBUILDER section of Alpha(x).txt.

 

[induktio]

One of the main features of Thinker is faction placement where the random map generator tries to distribute starting locations more evenly across the whole map area. It is mostly designed to work on large map sizes. Smaller maps wouldn't have enough room to adjust locations that much. The spawning logic works on a "best effort" basis. It first tries to find locations that are far away from any immediate neighbors and then keeps decreasing the minimum distance if no suitable location is found.

Faction placement also guarantees no faction starts on a tiny island. It is recommended to use it with the WorldBuilder values that are shipped with Thinker. For difficulty level adjustment, the newest develop version has cost_factor and expansion_factor options available among other things.

 

[Jarek Noschese]

You could use Dilithium Dad's Ultimte Builder map, (I added this map to the CFC downloads area because it's difficult to find.) You also could play on larger maps. See my BigSMACXMaps1 and 2.zip in the Alpha Centauri Downloads forum. If you play play SMAX (as opposed to SMAC), you should definitely use pre-made really big maps for reasons discussed in the comments for these maps.



I'm not sure what you mean. Please elaborate.


You could experiment with different values in the #WORLDBUILDER section of Alpha(x).txt.

Sorry about that. I forgot to mention that the amount of available solar Energy would be affected by Planet's distance from it's parent star/s. The closer Planet was to the center of it's solar system, of course, the more solar Energy there would be available. The farther out it was, the less Energy that there would be. Also, I'm currently doing just fine as the Gaians on the Standard Map of Planet on Citizen difficulty. I have an entire landmass all to myself, and, so far, none of my neighbours have pronounced Vendetta against me. So maybe I'll try the Huge Map of Planet on Specialist level if ALL goes well.

 

[Gelion]

Not answering the original question, but it works really well on a MAC via the GoG build. Hope it helps someone...