Customizing Stars!

With the excception of StarsEd, the methods decribed below usually involve the creation of unique starting conditions for game play. Defining rules to direct race creation or game play can make a significant difference to the style and feel of a game and are not mutually exclusive with the methods described here. See Variations or Themes under Game styles for games that have been modified in this manner.

Pre-genning

Often used in conjuntion with remapping, pre-genning is forcing the generation of a large number of turns. The process often involves the host controlling the player races for a number of turns to create the desired starting conditions. A host race may be used to create ships for moving populations or minerals required by the start. There are a couple of issues that must be dealt with during the pre-gen process:

1. If the start requires researching by any race(including host race) then any SS races will gain a tech advantage. Because of this SS races are sometimes banned from pre-genned games.
2. If each races starting population and surface mineral amounts are to be preserved, the excess growth and mined minerals need to be removed. This is usually done by loading them onto host created(and transferred) ships and then deleting the ships. There is no way to preseve mineral concentrations.

Games which have used pre-genning include:

AFON start games

XDude's Afon start games have each player starting without HW's, approx 1 million colonists and lots of minerals loaded into 10 SFX, 40 Privateers, and 40 Large Freighters. Players also start with at least Prop & Con 8. SS races were not banned.

Jump starts

Jump start games do not usually involve any host controlling of races, but rather just the pre-genning of many turns - often 50 to 100 turns. Sometimes the first few turns may be played; if so, an oft recommended strategy is to select the Generalised research LTR and set research to Weapons tech.

HST file editing

Currently the only person able to effect HST file editing is Wumpus, however he is willing to do editing for others to make possible interesting game setups. At least two games have taken advantage of his offer:

Bidding for techs

During the setup stage of Bidding for techs (thread at HWF), players bid for the technology levels they wished to start with and once the bidding was completed the HST file was edited to give each player the tech level they had won.

Pirates

The game Pirates! (thread at HWF) required the Host player(Pirate Controller - PC) to take over the HW's of the 10 pirate players and be at max tech before the game proper began. Using HST editing this was achieved at 2400. In addition, editing allowed all 11 PC planets to start with full population, mines, factories and defences and a fully armed Deathstar with inf/inf gate and W13 drivers. It also allowed Random Events to remain enabled which would have been a game ruiner with pre-genning.