Brand New Worlds: Gratuitous Space Battles

The release of the conquest mode for Gratuitous Space Battles caused me to reinstall and lose a couple of weekends plotting and planning. Conquest provided a campaign to sit alongside the standalone bouts of ship wrecking and, lo, it was good. A few months ago, unbeknownst to me, a clever sort who goes by the name Pendra on the Positech forums released a random galaxy generator, providing Endless Consecutive Contextual Gratuitous Space Battles. There was an update to the generator this morning, which Cliffski mentioned in the Twittersphere, and I've copied some details into the emptiness below.

You can download the generator directly from this link. Galaxies can be customised as follows, during startup:

- Starting money, crew, pilots
- Factory probability on planets (0-100%) + chance of small/large factory
- Academy probability on planets (0-100%) + chance of small/large academy
- Production probability on planets (0-100%) + chance of A Shipyard/B Shipyard/Repair facility
- Enemy fleet value From-To
- Icon size scale to fleet value
- Probability of fighter/frigate/cruiser inhibition (0-100%) a planet like that will most likely come with a shipyard to make sure you don't end up with an unaccessable area.
- Probability of various hostile planetary effects (0-100%)
- number of long range wormholes: create a few pathways between very distant planets

Time to reinstall once more, I reckon, especially since I haven't played with the most recent DLC yet either. It's amazing how much randomisation options can add to a game - even if it's a case of stringing together nodes with variable qualities, which is how this most probably works, I rarely tire of seeing the results of my computer building worlds.

Any favourite world generation procedures? I'd have to go for Dwarf Fortress because it doesn't just make a world, it journeys through the history of that world to reach the point where play begins.