Is there a mod that places the.....

[aaatoysandmore]

AI in more equal positions? Look at this picture. I have it setup for "DISTANT" and all my games end up like this. I might as well play on an 8x8 map with plentiful colonies at this rate.

Is there a mod that will fix this?

[aaatoysandmore]

I want to play including myself with 9 races and 3 at the top, 3 in the middle and 3 at the bottom.

[Bingeling]

No, it is not possible to influence that with a mod. The galaxy starting options (and editor) is what is available.

[SirHoraceHarkness]

You have to set a few to a middling distance or the game will squish them all in a corner as far away as it can.

[aaatoysandmore]

ORIGINAL: SirHoraceHarkness

You have to set a few to a middling distance or the game will squish them all in a corner as far away as it can.

That is all of them set at a distant. As you can see there's really only one left that isn't at my front door steps. Where the hell would they be if I set it to near? They can't get much closer.

The only good game I had so far is when the game sets me in the middle. That one they surrounded me but at least were pretty equal distance. This one they are just unreasonably close on a 15x15 grid map.

I tested an 8x8, 250, normal to see what would happen. I couldn't believe the same thing happens. They squished all right down in about 4 grids x 4 grids of the map with me where I was located. One of them declared war on me within a few turns of starting (I only had 2 or 3 colonies and I couldn't even see one of its planets and it just proceeded to take mine at will. Not a fun experience this time.

[SirHoraceHarkness]

Hmmm, dunno then. Never had that issue with setting the ai to distant past the tendency to bunch them up on the far side of the map. Might be a value is off due to a corrupted file from the mod install or some such.

[RiftHick]

When you select who/ what and how many rivals you have you can also opt to have them try to be placed in or as close to specific sectors as possible. If you tell rival empire 1 to start in A1 they'll try to be as close to A1 as they can, usually they are one or two sectors away from it though on some occasions they can be quite far outside of your requests. I routinely use this setting and have never had everyone bunched up in a corner regardless of how many empires I've had playing.

[aaatoysandmore]

ORIGINAL: RiftHick

When you select who/ what and how many rivals you have you can also opt to have them try to be placed in or as close to specific sectors as possible. If you tell rival empire 1 to start in A1 they'll try to be as close to A1 as they can, usually they are one or two sectors away from it though on some occasions they can be quite far outside of your requests. I routinely use this setting and have never had everyone bunched up in a corner regardless of how many empires I've had playing.

I don't get that kind of choice when settin up the game. All I ever get is near, average or distant. Is that something you are doing in the editor or is that something in Universe? I only have the old vanilla game with all the expansions. Matrix/Slitherine kinda screwed us when they put out Universe.

[RiftHick]

It is something you can do when you chose the other empires one of the final screens before you generate a new game. Instead of telling the AI to decide for itself which quantity of random empires it wants...you opt to decide those things manually this allows you to tweak various things for each of the other empires. The option box to the far right edge of manual choices is as I recall the one that deals with giving that empire a rough guideline as to where they should try to spawn (as mentioned usually they are one or two sectors away from it due to how the universe was formed, other times they are on point or very off point). This guideline is based on map sectors, so A1 is always going to be the most top left corner sector. I use this if I am playing with 12 empires or less so I can hopefully give most of them enough room so they can last long enough to do something. The other options you get with manual choice allow you to set other empires to have different starting tech levels, different starting populations..etc, so if all you want to do is have random empires but have each random empire hopefully be spread out this can work but obviously you'll have to make sure the manual settings keep random government, random species and make sure that the tech and starting population boxes are properly set to how you want them (I remember there being an inconsistency in the past with AI starting population option when manually set, the same setting that allows you to start with 2Billion means they start with like 5Billion).