Starting planets

[Onikenshin]

I have been doing some research and haven't found out if you can even start out with multiple planets on sins.

 Is this possible?

 If so is this how it will play out?

[Corey]

Yes, it's possible to set up maps more or less however you want to. Our maps will generally fall into two categories:

1. Sins/FTGU style, where you start with between one and three planets, mostly dependent on map size. This is what the mod will mostly be balanced around, and these kinds of maps will make up the vast majority of them.

2. ICW style, "campaign" based.  These ones will have most of the galaxy set up essentially how you'd expect it to be based on timeperiods. A bunch of ICW campaigns will probably be implemented this way. There are a few technical limitations in that we can't change the tech tree between different maps so playing the Thrawn campaign you'd still have Nebulas and Sovereigns but nothing we can do about that, and that in this type of map you have to force the player to have the right faction or nothing will spawn properly, meaning we'd have to have multiple copies of the same map. Not sure what the performance implications would be. These kind are a lot more work so I wouldn't expect too many, and since they're mostly meant for singleplayer challenge-mode "historical" stuff we won't be especially concerned about balancing them one way or another.

[tlmiller]

I think the "campaign" style games will be a lot of fun in Ascendency.  Look forward to whenever they make it in to try them.

[Lord Xizer]

Indeed

[Xendrek]

Im not sure if this is coded or not but just a thought I had, for the ICW type maps couldnt you have a victory condition or something that disables the non-time period units?

[Corey]

No, you can't disable or enable units like that.

[Crisiss]

Im not sure if this is coded or not but just a thought I had, for the ICW type maps couldnt you have a victory condition or something that disables the non-time period units?

Sins is played in real time, EaW is... well not. Not really sure what to call it.

Since Sins is played in real time and has no set sections or conditions in which you can get new tech (besides time and money of course) you can't "lock out" certain techs for factions. If you played a multiplayer game I guess you could make a pact to only build X era ships, but that's about it. You can, however, lock out certain trees if you pick another. Say there is a tree that branches into two directions, if you take tech X instead of tech Y you can no longer research tech Y. That doesn't seem particularly useful, though, or at least from what I have seen in this mod. I've messed with strings and tech a bit so I'm not stranger to that. Not sure how else you could do what you're aiming for, however.