I don't think everybody quite understood you How..

Let me try and help out:

In a random map, For every player starting spot Sins generates, it generates 3 planets: 1 Terran HW, 1 astroid and 1 Fire or Ice. The two other planets are very close to the HW and they form a little "cluster". This *is* the starting position. This is what allows a player to bootstrap their economy. This is *always* the same for *all* players, *all* the time.

When the bug in question here occurs, Sins still generates the same planets as the start position for a player, but it "forgets" to put a phase lane between the HW and one of these two "startings position" planets. It's very clear that this is the case by the proximity of the planets and their position.

If a MP games starts, and all players have one astroid they can quickly grab with little effort, yet one player is stuck having to struggle to get his first planet, that player is in a disadvantage. I doubt these starting position missing lanes are a feature to make the game more challenging or anything like that. It's quite obvious from the map layout that they are simply missing.

To further demonstrate my point:

Here is an example of a normal starting position: 1 terran HW, 1 astroid, and one ice or volcano (ice in this case). The other Terran is just part of the normal random generation which happens to be close to the starting position:

The HW is connected to both planets that form the "starting position".

This is an example of a bugged starting position: You can clearly see that the astroid and the volcano form the starting position together with the HW. However the map generator "forgot" the phase lane to the astroid, and also decided to skip the lane to the volcano because something else happened to be closer (the storm). That should never happen. This puts the player in that position in a serious disadvantage.

And to demonstrate the point even further, I started a quick single player huge game, saved a recording and glued two screen shots together. However even in that quick one that I started, one of the AI players got a bugged start...

So here is the huge map where all of the starting positions can be clearly seen:

As you can easily see from this image, a normal starting position in a random map is terran HW + astroid + ice / volc. Also if you counted the planets you'd see that the planets that are part of the starting position, are not counted towards the total number of planets in the map (random huge single = 58).




And here is a closer look of the three top ones, and you can see the that the one in the middle simply has one phase lane missing:




So there is clearly a bug in the random map generator.

San, thanks man. You have clarified this very well.

Post has been updated to add an even more horrific start. This has to be the worst start I have ever seen. After my allies and I saw the start, we rehosted the game, so I don't know how the rest of the map looked.

BUMP.

Devs, is there any chance of fixing the random map generator for v1.1?

Thanks,

Addicted Sins Player

The fix really is very simple:

1. Always specifically create the HWs lanes with their "satelite" planets (the roid and the ice/fire that make up the starting position). My guess is that generator algorithm doesn't just place a lane between the HW and its satelites, but rather generates all three and then leaves the lanes to the normal "lane generator" part of the generator, relying on their proximity to generate a lane for them.
   
2. Have a minimum distance between planets, and around starting positions. My guess is that when the generator generates a planet it doesn't check or compare its position to previously generated planets. This in turn means that there is always the small chance that two planets will end up too close to each other. The same is true for starting positions - reject a generated position if it's within a certain radius around a starting position.
   

 

Wow, I had noticed this before, but I've never gotten anything this bad. I've played multi some, but mostly been doing single for time issues lately, so I can just imagine how annoying that would be to get hosed like that in multi. Hopefully they'll fix this for 1.1 After all as San Tsu says, they just need to make sure the HW has phase lanes to all the "starting" planets. Should be even easier since it doesn't count them I'd think, albeit I'm not a coder. Still it'd be nice if they would fix it, the rest of the map can stay random, just as long as they get the start even.

Bump.  Devs, is this getting fixed?

Bump.   Crickets....Chirp...Chirp.  Devs?

Bump

I just read this and that round with mazou is pretty funny. You are totally right howdid that guy didnt have a chance. Sp people dont understand how different mp is. I mean its like a whole different game. Everything you learn in sp must be unlearned. I use to be a sp cause I have played rts online and always stresses me out. I decided to give sins a go online and its freakin fun as heck. Some of the funnest games of all time for online play. I also hate when you play like 3v3 or 4v4 and your the unlucky one surrounded by enemies. You know double team is coming.

Yes, I made the mistake of asking questions on a forum to better understand the initial complaint.  Boo me.

Anyway, I'd like to know if any progress has been made on this as well.

Blair has stated that a fix will be in one of the expansions.  I don't know if it will be Entrenchment or not.  One can hope though.

Yeah, I'd imagine their plate's rather full right now stomping out the multitude of bugs the Entrenchment beta introduced.  Good luck to 'em.

Bump