@NotEnoughLigh_t1 yeah, I meant customizing the locations of unique systems. Maybe someday, no short term plans. Sol in particular has a lot of special logic (over the years, there's been many duplicate Sol bugs), so I'm hesitant to add more to the mix.

If you want to experiment with manually editing the downloaded txt file, see my comment from September 10 about customizing marauder systems (which are essentially unique systems), and TheDongsmasher's reply.

something like, you designate a star to be the sol system, once playing it any empire that has sol system as home system will spawn there

and what about unique star systems being added?

if by customize systems, you mean customizing the planets within a system, then never. for customizing the locations of systems, maybe someday but no short term plans

so, when the app will be able to let us customize systems and also put unique systems (ex: alpha centauri, sol, deneb, etc), wish to make a near real life replica of our local stellar groupd

@Xialchicken7 and @Captain Bart, thanks for confirming that forced spawn empires are indeed working. I'll add a note to the known issues that they aren't listed in the galaxy setup screen though

@Captain Bart yep, feedback is always appreciated :) I didn't intend to sound annoyed, just wanted to let you know that I won't get to it soon (a few weeks at the earliest)

@Xialchicken Wierd, I can spawn custom empires, at least I think so They are modified versions of base game ones.

No problem I'm just asking, I know how hard coding is take your time. I simply wanted to leave feedback.

Apologies for all the comments, but I think I must have just been blind the first time I tried this. Empires I specify to spawn do spawn in the galaxy, but don't show up in the little pre-game menu. Sorry for the confusion!

Hi Oatmeal Problem! Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I had cooked up a small galaxy using your tool, and set a single other empire to spawn, with all others being random. The forced empire never materialized. Unlike usually, the forced empire didn't appear in the little bar below the mock galaxy on the setup page – I wonder why it fails so soon. I was running only this mod and tiny outliner. If you do find time to see if this was an issue on my end, or something inherent, I would be very grateful! Thanks for all the great work nonetheless.

@Xialchicken I haven't tested for that specifically and you're the first to report it, so I can't confirm if it's a known issue from this mod. If it is though, then that's a limitation of static galaxies and there's nothing I can do about it (the force spawn mechanic is almost entirely unmoddable)

@Captain Bart I have a to-do to add a counter, and a to-do to improve the clustering behavior. Life is busy at the moment though

Hi Guys, let me know if I'm being stupid, but I am unable to force spawn AI empires. Is this a known issue/intended? Thanks, and great mod!

Also loosen clusters seams to not be working as intended, I'm not sure if it's the image or if it craps out at the 2000 stars I'm trying to make it do. It has stars just clumped into groups that in game make them very hard to click on.

Could you pretty please add a counter to stars and spawns, I'm fighting the generation to make a milkiway map and need to able to figure out how many stars there is.

nice, thanks!

@SEZER that's expected for now, copying some previous comments:

"the max number of AI empires determined by the number of spawn points on the map, but it will always be less than the number of spawn points (2/3). This is a work around for some bugs in static galaxies (empires that aren't counted as AI empires use those spawn points too, and there will be bugs if it runs out of spawn points to use).

I have a to-do to investigate the underlying behavior more thoroughly. Potentially, I can change that so the max AI spawns equals the number of spawn points minus 1 (reserve one for the player). More research needed, so not putting anything in the description or discussion yet"

thanks for the kind words! no vlog, but I do blog (infrequently) at https://oatmeal.gg

i created galaxy with 666 stars and 16 spawns but when creating a game it only allows me to add 10 AI empires, please fix.

besides that, this is awesome mod and i wish some dev-vlog vid on how you menaged to do it :D

For anyone still playing v3.14, there's now a patch available courtesy of Recon1o6:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3573084816

This mod probably works as is with 4.1, but I'll verify and update if needed in the next day or 2

I noticed that as I was playing around with it. I think what I'll do instead (also crazy) is link the only preferred start system to every other system and play as a gate-builder empire with only primitives. Cool mod, thanks for uploading!

@The Law Mostly no... The mod only supports up to 100 custom wormhole pairs, so there just wouldn't be enough wormholes to connect anything beyond a very small map. You could achieve something kinda similar by setting the hyperlane distance low, and allowing disconnected clusters. That should give you a bunch of "islands" of hyperlane clusters, which you could then connect manually with wormholes.

Is there a way that we could have no hyperlanes and only wormholes/gateways? I know it's probably not ideal for playing but I want to try it out.

Thanks for reply

@Eragon PYRUS if Fallen Empires are off, there are no incompatibilities. If they're on, I think they are not game-breaking, but I haven't tested much. Load order makes no difference.

And which one should below(which one must overwrite other)?

"Mods that edit common/fallen_empires have minor incompatibilities (I only know of Ancient Cache of Technologies and Ethics & Civics: Bug Branch; I will coordinate with these authors to fix)" what kind of incompabilities game breaking or ignorable(For ACOT)?

I think as long as they have different names (both file name and the name inside the the file) they should both work, even without changing priority

edit: i found out how. if im correct you move the priority up.

Im curious how do you make 2 maps into the mod? i put maps - setup_scenarios- map1.text - map2.text its not showing up. how do i make a multiple maps in a single mod? i google it and it just shown me to add by map1 so map 1 and 2 are in the same folder.

Thanks for sharing! You've definitely earned a spot in the "special thanks" when I get around to writing that manual editing guide <3

This works as long as marauder_n_1 is set first, so it would work even in this order

system = { id = "2" position = { x = -355 y = 156 } initializer = marauder_1_1 }
system = { id = "286" position = { x = -368 y = 120 } initializer = marauder_1_3 }
system = { id = "367" position = { x = -343 y = 120 } initializer = marauder_1_2 }

This forces them to spawn even if Marauder Empires are set to off in the galaxy generation settings, but if they are set to randomly spawn, this seems to take the spot of the randomly spawned one.
They appear to be initialized by line number: I made the game generate a ridiculous amount of AI empires(390 in a 400 star galaxy) and an AI took the spot where marauder was supposed to spawn. The marauders did spawn every time when I moved the line of the system they're in to the top of the file, however.

Marauders aren't spawned in the same way as "normal" empires. I don't think spawn weight will affect them at all. Instead, you should set "initializer = marauder_1_1" (or 2_1 or 3_1). You can optionally also set neighboring (by hyperlane) systems to marauder_<1/2/3>_2 and marauder_<1/2/3>_3. If you omit those, the mod has logic to "insert" those 2nd and 3rd systems.

I'm not sure how important order is. Definitely 1_1 should be spawned before 1_2 or 1_3. They might also need to be before random (no "initializer =") systems, so that a random system doesn't use that initializer first. I also don't know if the order that systems are initialized is just by line number (in which case you can just move lines around) or by ID number, which would be trickier since those are also used to link hyperlanes.

Again, please share results if you test this out! I want to write up guides for this later (and maybe someday build it into the app)

I'm guessing it just ignores(always returns true?) the "if" when it doesn't have "limit", but I'm also surprised it didn't break everything and didn't cause any errors in the log(that I could see).
I'm now trying to figure out if it's possible to spawn the marauders at a set point. They seem to have a special civic (civic_anarcho_tribalism), so I might just try to do something with that.

Didn't know you could set flags on custom empirs... yeah, no risk of it matching a random empire that way. Thanks for reporting back! Btw you don't need that "if = { ... }" wrapper. I'm actually a little surprised it's working with that, because that's not a technically correct "if" (it's missing a "limit")

@Oatmeal Problem
Thank you very much for the suggestion! I ended up doing this:

1. Made a flag list in [mod]\common\prescripted_flags
the syntax looks like this
empire_custom_flag_z1 = {
flags = { test_custom_z1 }
}

2. Added the flags to the empire template in user_empire_designs_v3.4
(eg. flag="empire_custom_flag_z1")

3. Added the flag to the galaxy map file the way you suggested
spawn_weight = { base = 0 modifier = { add = 1000 if = { has_country_flag = test_custom_z1 } } } }


It seems to work well at first glance, I'll test it more tomorrow.

Continued:

Explanation: base = 0 means by default no empires will spawn there, but the modifier makes so empires with the specific civics will spawn there. Change the values of civic_1 and civic_2 to the actual civics of your custom empire. If that's not specific enough (eg a random empire spawns with those same civics), you could add additional checks (eg has_ethic, has_trait). Then, set your empire design to forced spawn, and start the game.

I haven't tested this. If you give it a try, let me know if it works! And feel free to reach out on discord for assistance.

@TheDongsmasher I think the best way to accomplish this would be by editing the spawn_weight inside the galaxy file. Find text that looks like this:

spawn_weight = { base = 10 modifier = { add = 10 ruler = { check_variable_arithmetic = { which = trigger:leader_age modulo = 10 value = 1 } } } }

These are the spawn systems. Some of the numbers in that line might be different than the above. Find the own you want your custom empire to spawn on (you can see the coordinate earlier in that line; note that higher y values correspond to the bottom of the screen, and higher x values correspond to the left side of the screen). Then change the spawn weight section to something like:

spawn_weight = { base = 0 modifier = { add = 1000 AND = { has_civic = civic_1 has_civic = civic_2 } } }

Hey, amazing job on the mod!
I'm wondering if it I could force a specific custom AI empire to spawn at a specific spawn point. I don't know much about the paradox script, but my first thought was to just put the initializer from the generated map(e.g. basic_init_01) into the user_empire_designs, but that breaks the custom empire design and causes the game to crash. Do you happen to know of a good way to do this?

@Awww manx I probably won't do that. It would be a decent amount of work to implement, and it could get complicated to maintain in the long run as the format changes. Plus there won't be much need for it for future maps once I add the ability to save and load multiple maps in the app.

Hey, I think you should have an ability to load the text files of galaxies, cause I have a map I'd like to rework on that's from a month ago and broke when I tried changing it manually from the text file.

It would be fun to actually have to go Stealth. This mod is so simple to use and fun, you can make all sorts of interesting things. I could totally see a sort of maze-galaxy in my future which would be pretty funny. You did a great job!

Maybe you can sneak around the edge of the system? Or use stealth ships? Good luck
I leaning against ever including manual system placement in Paint a Galaxy, cause it could get a bit complicated/unintuitive on my end since the website has no way of knowing which DLCs and mods you're using, but at the very least I intend to write a guide for manually editing things like that. It's a pretty good "baby's first mod" project. (I want to clarify those maybe issues first.)

Again, if you or anyone else wants to try it out, reach out on Discord and I'll help walk you through the changes. No modding experience required. It'll help me figure out what to include in the eventual guide. One could even argue, the stupider you are, the better so I can make sure the guide is robust

Haha, I'm stupid as hell so I won't even try. But thanks. I'll just consider it a bonus challenge having to fight off a leviathan early on. Just figured I'd ask here.

Yep, what Shoarmadad said. The part I'm unsure about is if there's any special consideration with the order of systems in the static galaxy (eg could a system with no specified initializer be created first randomly using that dimensional horror initializer, and if so, what happens to the later system that did specify that same initializer). If anyone has experience with this, please share :)

@Terran you can do that by editing system initializers in the setup scenario file. It requires basic modding knowledge and a bit of your own time.

Fair. Well, thanks anyways. I'll just figure out a way to go around it. No worries. Cheers!

@Terran nothing built in, no. It's likely possible with manual editing, but I haven't tested and static maps can be finicky. If manual editing doesn't sound too scary, reach out on Discord and I can I'll offer guidance in exchange for you sharing the results :)

@Shoarmadad the app already saves your map. If you close the tab or window and reopen, it should still be there. If it's not, then it seems your browser is configured to aggressively "clean up" website data. Reach out on Discord and I can help figure that out

With the planned changes I mentioned, it will be possible to save several maps.

I really, REALLY like this mod. Super awesome, thank you so much. But is there any way to choose where Leviathans will spawn? I made a map featuring a lot of choke points and little self contained galaxies, only to learn that the Dimensional Horror spawned on my only exit/entrance, completely trapping me haha

The usecase would be that it would be possible to "work" on a galaxy for longer than you can realistically keep a tab open. But I don't precisely know how the program works, so thanks for the answer :)

@Shoarmadad short answer no. Galaxy txt files can do basically anything, but Paint a Galaxy cannot, so information would be lost during the import. In theory, I could import a txt file that was created with Paint a Galaxy, but that's still quite a bit of work. What's your usecase?

I'll note that I plan to add a concept of "projects" to Paint a Galaxy, so you can have multiple saved maps in the app instead of only 1. That should handle some of the situations people want to import.