Hello!

I decided to release an early version of a huge map I have put together to get some feedback, for future improvements. It is primarily designed for reasonably equally matched players to play over a number of sessions, rather than in one sitting.

Comprising of 30 odd stars and well over 400 planets this map does away with the ability to jump from one star to any other, by not having any in-system phase lanes to stars. Rather, systems are interlinked via wormholes and when all of them are viewed from the right angle, the map resembles the three star constellations on which the map is based; Centarus, Crux and Vela.

(Galaxy Forge uses a reverse bird’s eye view and this is the perspective at which the constellation is marked out. It won’t be identical as the stars are randomly (?) distributed on the z axis too).

As there are no worm holes connecting any of these constellations other routes have to be found, and these are in the hands of the pirates!

I also chose to increase a couple of the map’s variables such as ‘metersPerGalaxyUnit’. The net result being that travel times are greatly increased and I’ve found this to make sins play a lot more like chess!  You may have to turn down your GFX settings as more of the map becomes visible and the best way to get a quick idea on how the map will run on your system is to hit surrender and keep playing. Just to give you an idea, although I get low FPS on my rig (E6600, 2GBram, 7900GS) @ medium settings the map is, imo, still very playable.

(On a related note I also had issues with getting the scouts to automatically explore in some systems)

So, please give it a try out and if you can spare the time report back with your thoughts (particularly regarding pace and how the map features effect play) and any bugs you may find!

Link to Map --> https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?skinid=96&libid=70