![[MGC]Sedition](//skins11.wincustomize.com/33/25/3325345/70/311/preview-70-311.jpg)
My first new map in a while. I wanted to create a map that was a multistar for eight players but also of a reasonable size for multiplayer games. One problem with multistars is the choke at the star, I tried to counteract that by adding phase lanes and wormholes to link the systems and also by restricting the strategic value of what could be accessed directly from the star itself. Note also that for 4 vs 4 team games the players will be placed alternately, with one player from each team on the opposite side of each gas giant. Any suggestions for improvements welcome. It is a map with reflectional rather than rotational symmetry, so perhaps there is room for improvement there, however it would still have to keep to the design criteria I've outlined, and a problem with rotational symmetry might be that all the players of one team had direct access to the ice planet, rather than only two of them.
The map should also be suitable for FFA games. The problems with human FFA games we have at the moment are that the maps tend to be too big and the Diplomatic Victory condition is an entirely unsatisfactory method of determining the winner of a human FFA game. Also, FFA games tend to reward the players that refrain from combat. As this map is quite small in terms of resources, these issues should be alleviated somewhat, a player who avoids combat should have an inadequate base to create much of a fleet.
I've often advocated a different victory condition based on ownership of all of a map's artifacts, but it also occurs to me that the problem is vastly compounded by the unlimited nature of resources in the game, which I feel is holding Sins back as a game- after all the entire impetus for exploration and conquest has always come from there being finite resources available to the competing factions. Having created the problem of unlimited resources, Sins tries to work around that with 'supply costs,' which has created the somewhat artificial economy-starbases-fleet boom gameplay we have at the moment, as if it was at all rational that it should cost money to crew and service ships and not starbases. Sins fails hard at multiplayer FFA, which is the mode that new players might expect to play the game in. Having a limit on the resources available would be an automatic aid to speeding up and concluding games.
I also noted when I uploaded this map that it seemed to be directly available for download here: https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/sins_maps/311/ with none of the delays that other map creators have complained of in the past. Perhaps we can finally get a community multiplayer mappack onto the Sins download site itself?
