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You could try using the map editor, and giving all warppoints in the player's start system a cloaking ability.
Problem is that there is a hard code thingy that makes warp points visible even in a sector or system that is obscured. Not sure why, cause you
can hide planets and stars this way. Game won't allow it for warp points though.
You
could come up with a new bitmap for invisible warp points that is the same as the background system image. But there is no way for them to then become visible during the game. They will always be invisible.
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Of course you could approach it in a completely different way.
Have players only have "Fighters" to start with, and they have to develop tech in order to get ships that *can* use warp points.
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Can you make a mod with really big "fighters" that are actually ships without warp capability? That would really change the game. You would then have regular-size ships that need carriers to go from system to system (and obviously the biggest ones would never fit in a carrier), but they would have zero maintenance. And there would be wierd effects in combat: they'd be susceptible to PD fire but not missiles.
This is fairly easy to do. The problem is that there is no way to colonize planets in your own system until you "discover" the standard ships types. Because fighters cannot hold cargo. You could create a new colony mod that can be put on a fighter, but you cannot put any population on it. Your colonies will have zero pop.
Actually, you could modify the settins.txt file and give a value to the line "Automatic Colonization Population :=0". Then your fighter/colonizers can make a colony, and the population will be there. You won't be able to transfer population or cargo among planets. And you wont be able to build a ship that can launch sats or mines, but I guess since you don't know about warp points you wouldn't need to do this anyway, except where your planets are.
(An interesting thing about this if you decide to try it. When I tested it, my ships don't have a colonize button. But if you go to the planets screen and hit "send colony ship" it will make a colony that way.)
This is another reason to want Drones implemented. At least acording to the txt files, drones will be settable to warp capable or not warp capable, and have cargo ability.
Geoschmo