Map Makers Guide Thread - Star Wars: Interregnum mod for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

Hello Everyone,

With the recent release of the Official Interregnum Map Pack, some of you may be excited to open up your Interregnum Galaxy Forge and make the Star Wars maps of your dreams. And you totally should! The addon sections of the moddb page is there exactly for such fan creations. However, if you want to go above sharing your maps with others and want to submit them to be added in the Interregnum Mod itself, you should keep the following map design issues in mind. Even if you don't plan on submitting your maps, this is good advice that might help you make better, more playable maps.

Starting Positions

One of the big limitations with what you can do with custom maps is the AI, in particular with starting positions. Yes, you CAN make a map where everyone starts out with only a dead asteroid, but unless you want your map to be for humans only, such a start would result in a fairly dull game where the AI largely just sits there. So for optimal AI performance, keep in mind these rules.

1. All players should start with positive income for all three resources. It might sound fun to start the Rebels on their base on Hoth, but Ice planets only have crystal mines, no metal. If the AI runs out of metal before colonizing a planet that has metal, it is probably game over (the AI will use the black market, but it is not great at it). There are ways you can get around this tough if you are dead set on having a player start on X planet. The easiest is to give players more than one planet to start with, a single asteroid will suffice to give some metal income. Alternatively, you can add asteroids not normally found on a planet to a map in Rebellion. See this thread for details on this little know feature.

2. Unless you have given each player several planets already, there should be at least one planet the AI can expand to with fairly weak militia and no research necessary to colonize. Typically this will be an asteroid or dwarf planet. This is because the standard homeworlds do not start out with enough logistics slots for the AI to get on a good footing with research. It is quite possible the AI will choose to build military labs on his homeworld, even though he is surrounded by ice planets that need civic colonization research. Having at least one easy planet to colonize reduces the chance of this AI stall from happening dramatically.

DLC

If you want everyone with Interregnum to play your map, you need to make sure any planets/stars added by the Stellar Phenomenon or Forbidden Worlds DLCs are absent from your map. You are free to upload maps with such planets in the addon section, but you should mention what DLCs are required to play it. I will not accept any map that requires DLCs to run to be included in Interregnum, since I want everyone to be able to play any included map.

Two exceptions to this are the Oceanic and Barren (NoAtmosphere) planets. Because E4X is older than Forbidden Worlds, it already had these two planet types before that DLC was even created. As such E4X and thus Interregnum use the E4X version instead of the Forbidden Worlds version for these planets.

If you want custom maps to have DLC planets, try using random planet lists in your maps (RandomUncolonizeable, RandomTrue etc.). Maps with these planet types can be used by anyone, and DLC owners will get a chance to have their planets, while non-DLC owners simply will have an available random planet spawn.

As of this moment, I am unsure if this restriction applies to Forbidden Worlds (FW) planet bonuses in Galaxy Forge. Use at your own risk.

The Banned DLC Planet/Star List

• Ferrous (Hydrocarbon usually works as a good replacement)
• Greenhouse
• Antimatter Fountain
• Comet
• Shattered Moon
• Ship Graveyard
• Ice Field
• Radiation Storm
• Pulsar
• Neutron Star
• Black Hole

Edited by: GoaFan77