Please note that "Start Anywhere with Anything" is something that I've preemptively vetoed, it's specifically against the game design. If you want the "perfect" scenario, you'll have to really work for it in the scenario editor. My suggestion: don't always play with your favorite starting unit or your ideal starting location. That's exactly what will kill the game for you, making it seem like every game is always the same because you intentionally are skipping out on all the variety it really offers.
I read your arguments in the Wiki, but I am not convinced. I miss this feature, we are wasting a lot of time clicking through maps in order to get the ships we want.
I never play a casual game of AIWar. This game is a real challenge. I am playing against AI level 7, and I win perhaps one out of every ten games. Given this sort of opposition I always have a plan, and this includes knowing in advance what kind of bonus ship I shall try out this time around.
Your counterargument is that if I use the same ship type config every time, the game will be boring in the long run. This is only partially true. My opening moves will tend to be the same, but when I find an advanced space lab, randomness sets in, and in most games this means a change of plans. If the day arrives, where my opening config is so strong that I am sure to win the game no matter what other ships I acquire during the game, then your argument holds. But I am afraid that day never comes. And if it should come, I can always go to AI level 8. So there really is no reason why this feature should be vetoed. Accordingly I voted for it on the poll.
I respect that the final decision is yours. But you changed your mind on (unmentionable topic), so maybe we can make you change your mind on this one, too?
I've changed my mind on a variety of topics, for a variety of reasons. I try to be as open-minded as possible. But, this is not one that I'm currently feeling at all inclined to change on. From one angle, really, how much time are you wasting clicking through maps to find ones that you want? A minute or two per 8-12 hour game? That's not something I am really that worried about -- I think of it rather like re-rolling for your character at the start of a great many RPGs. Yes, you can keep going until you get almost exactly what you want. But there's a huge pressure to simply settle for something that is sort of what you want, and thus try something new.
In RPGs, that mechanic tends to be based around a pure gamble -- if you find something almost right, and then click re-roll again, then you've totally lost the one possible scenario and might well not find anything remotely as good for a long time. Of course, some RPGs compensate with a certain number of skill points that you can then allocate as you wish to buff your character further. With AI War, you can copy your favorite seed so far to the clipboard, and then go back to it if you are frustrated (or copy a new one to the clipboard when you find something better).
I am no stranger to re-rolling map seeds in order to find a "better" map than the current one. Sometimes I just don't like a layout, or it doesn't have any ships that I am that interested in playing at the moment. But what I end up settling on in the end is something a bit random, with positive and negative aspects, which I view as highly desirable. With multiplayer, this might be compounded with certain players really wanting a certain ship. If it's only two players, then you can probably find a map with a what both of them want fairly quickly (in my experience), although that might then create geographic constraints. Then the remaining players (I tend to play 4-player) are left to pick from amongst the remaining ships, which introduces yet more variety.
I firmly believe that this process leads to highly beneficial results, even if it does result in a minor bit of aggravation to some (or even a fair number of) players some of the time. This is something I've thought a lot about, and have had ample chance to witness in various forms in all my years of multiplayer gaming, and I feel it's important. If you look at a lot of modern FPS games (especially team-based ones), the same general theory is in play in a great number of them: weapon/vehicle drops are often random, and class slots are often limited, so in a given game it might be rare for you to get exactly everything that you want, just the way you want. So instead you have to experiment, and learn to function as part of your team, rather than just always going with your ol' standby.
You can claim that this reduces the strategy of the game, but there again I disagree: real generals don't get to set every last parameter for the battles they will go into, and they don't even really get to choose all the force they will have (if you have no more tanks, you have no more tanks). So a big part of their strategy, at the start especially, is figuring out how the heck to deal with the hand they have been given. There are a huge, huge number of very useful ships in the game, such that there should be multiple top-tier ships in almost any given map seed. Thus I really don't feel that this affects the difficulty of the game overmuch, it simply makes players use more than a single overall strategy (a primary goal for the game's design). Plans never survive contact with the enemy, right? Consider the map generator your first contact with the enemy -- as would be the case for a general in any real conflict, whose first order of business is finding out what the general terrain looks like and thus where the enemy can be presumed to be, seeing the possible deployment points given that data, and seeing what sort of forces he/she has been given from higher command.
(This was such a good followup question that I added it and my response to the wiki.)
Poll