Suggestion: Randomizing Minor Factions& AI Plots

[Admiral Tolwin]

Hello all together,

first thanks to that game I have lost hours and hours of lifetime to this game.

Since i have every Addon, there are a lot of Options to choose from. I have learned that it isnt a good Idea to activated all Minors and the most AI Plots in one game  
So i had the Idea it would be nice to randomize it, but randomizing the options alone isnt the right solution, cause it could happend that u get all in the worst case and nothing in the best case (still worst for me course i want some minor factions).

So it would be nice if it is possible to have the chance to choose some options i realy want and some should be random.

But this isnt the perfect solution, cause now i have the same problem (all vs nothing) with the random options. The impact to the game balance is to big so this isnt that usefull.
What i finatly want is the chance to have a game with Zenith Minors xor Human Colony and the Preservation Wardens xor Roaming enclave.

How could this be managed in the user interface?

If u select one Option to Random a Dropdownlist (or somthing like this) should appear in witch u can select a colour (or a digit, or ...), now every Option with the same colour is mutual exclusive (one of this Options should be happen but only this one).
In this way u can build a game with some suprising factors but still have the designated difficult.

I hope this was understandable, my goal is to make every game more unique without to know at the start what could be happen.

Anyway, keep it up!

P.S. :

As see i havnt use the search function right^^, there is allready a suggestion regards ramdomizing with is similar to my suggestion.
Can be found here:  http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=1545
But i still prefer my solution, cause how i understand the other suggestion there is still the possible to get a imbalanced game.

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the forums

Yes, as you saw we've talked about this one before.  It is something I want to do, just had so much else going on, but it's likely to happen in the future

My guess is that it would be something like this:
* Each Minor Faction and AI Plot lobby button is made tri-state: definitely-not-on, definitely-on, and eligible-for-random-pick.
* Add two textboxes: "minimum number of random minor-factions/ai-plots to pick", and a maximum of the same.
* When processing the lobby options, if there are any "eligible-for-random-pick" minor factions or ai plots, randomly pick a number between the min and max textbox values, and pick that many items at random from the "eligible-for-random-pick" list.
** One wrinkle is that if something like "Spirecraft - Easy" and "Spirecraft - Hard" are both marked eligible-for-random and one is picked, both have to be removed from the eligible list.  But not a huge deal.
* Done

Of course, the followup request will of course be "have an option to hide minor-factions/ai-plots on the galaxy stats screen", which would then be followed up by a request for "show the minor-factions/ai-plots that were set as definitely-on and only hide the ones randomly picked".  Which is why I don't just jump at every single simple-to-implement idea, because players will make sure it doesn't stay simple

[Admiral Tolwin]

Sounds realy good!

You are right regarding future request, and u have catch the spirit of the idea.

It is right not to jump in every "simple to add" Idea, because Ideas have to have some time to grow up (and sometimes to die   ).

Alone the unique experience to see the game growing up is it worthwhile, thanks u again for the good job!

[Vinraith]

Yeah, this is one of those suggestions that's come up many times, it was my first suggestion on the old suggestions forum in fact. Having played the game a great deal I actually find I'm somewhat less interested in it (having developed strong enough faction and plot preferences that I can't think of anything I'd set to "random" at this point), but it would still be a nice option to have.

[Echo35]

Yeah, this is one of those suggestions that's come up many times, it was my first suggestion on the old suggestions forum in fact. Having played the game a great deal I actually find I'm somewhat less interested in it (having developed strong enough faction and plot preferences that I can't think of anything I'd set to "random" at this point), but it would still be a nice option to have.

Ditto, but once in a while I may be feeling suicidal and drop the All Random on for kicks.