Map Generation Question

[MondSemmel]

Hi, I've clocked roughly 100 hours in AI War now (last campaign: win against diff 9 (one hard AI type) and 8.6 (one hard and one other AI type)) and finally had a question whose answer I couldn't already find on the wiki.

Namely: How does map generation work? I know that there are e.g. always 4 AI Co-Processors, and that available Knowledge scales linearly with the number of planets. But is e.g. the number of Spire Archives, Golems, or other AI Progress reducers constant, or is it affected by things like map size, map type, AI difficulty etc.?

I ask because my campaigns always take quite a while (that last campaign was 50 planets and took me 15h), and I'm curious how map size affects the difficulty, other than reducing the amount of available knowledge.

PS: I know about the wiki article on Choosing A Map Size, but it's not in-depth enough to answer my question. Also, is the recommended map size still around 80 planets?!

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the forums

AIP reducers have a set quantity that are always seeded regardless of map size.  Same with Advanced Research Stations, Advanced Factories (iirc more of _those_ are seeded if there are more human homeworlds, but it's been a while since I checked), and various other things.  I believe this is also true of Spire Archives and Golems.  Spirecraft Asteroids will be affected by map size, though, since they try to seed on every eligible planet.

Many of the less-player-focused special buildings like Troop Accelerators or Interplanetary Munitions Boosters and such will tend to have counts proportional to map size.

And yes, 80 planets is still the standard, though 50 should still be reasonably balanced.  40 is borderline, exhibiting significant changes in effective balance.  Below that's a pretty different game than an 80 planet galaxy (some advantages, some disadvantages).