[geoschmo]

You could mod out black holes, although I am not sure that's going to help much. I think those systmes are basically neutral. Some times they will actually help a player in a weaker position to defend his space.

However, one thing that makes maps uneven is when one player gets several habitable systems close to his home, and the other players is surounded by dead ones. So from that respect it's probably helpful to remove them.

You could design a modified quadrant that has only Standard type systems. You could also make it a little heavier on the warp points then a normal stock map, to make it harder to grab the choke points and bottle up a player.

As a matter of fact, their may be a map type like this in the FQM mod.

What you can't do is prevent the clunky way the game sometimes places empires, putting one guy in the middle and one in a corner, or two empires next door to each other. That's a code issue. As Slynky says he's working on it for the next patch.

[ February 02, 2004, 11:26: Message edited by: geoschmo ]