With this article I want to start a small "making of" series for the maps I made for SoaSE Celestial Bodies Mod. It will show you the ideas behind my maps. Also gives other mappers informations about the obstacles and problems while making a new map for Sins of a Solar Empire .

Setting up Players:

Till now all of my maps should have fixed player factions. I also had the idea to make unique Logos and player pictures for these maps. As I looked for a way to accomplish this task I found the player setup in the galaxy files (which are used as maps):

player
    designName "UE"
    inGameName "Union of Earth"
    overrideRaceName "Tech"
    teamIndex -1
    startingCredits 3000
    startingMetal 800
    startingCrystal 250
    isNormalPlayer TRUE
    isRaidingPlayer FALSE
    isInsurgentPlayer FALSE
    themeGroup ""
    themeIndex 0
    pictureGroup ""
    pictureIndex 0

After severall test and forum searches I found out, that overrideRaceName only works in the tutorial maps and themeGroup and pictureGroup changes don't work. I hope Ironclad's Devs will here my words and change this with a future addon or patch! Please!

Setting up new Templates:

Templates are a good way to spice up your map, cause you can change the startup ships and buildings for each player or make new militia.

Creating new templates (e.g. militia and homeworld) was easier than I tought. There are alot of threads in the forums discussing this. Here are two threads that helped me a lot:

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/339832

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/329520

Unfortunatly there is no way to give a player (or the pirates) a starbase at the beginning. I tried to add one but the Debugger shows me a message like: "...enity is not supported...". Maybe one of the Devs will read this (i also posted it somw while ago in the forums) and this feature will be added ?

CB Birth of the Trade Order

This was my first map for Sins, and most of the problems described above are happened with this map. The idea for this map was also the reason why I made the Celestial Bodies mod, cause the scenario takes place in out own solar system.

Story:

In the 24th century most of the planets and moons of Sol are colonized by mankind.
Then a long war between the great nations of Earth began ...

All colonies have to rely on their own and became indepentend societies.

In 2525 the Union of Earth was formed and began to rebuild the birthplace of the human race.
The young Union now has to struggle with new threads as they explore space again.

Who will unite the Sol system again?
Who will found the Trade Order?
You will decide!

Factions:

UE  - Union of Earth (Terra + Luna)
MVA - Martian Venusian Alliance (Mars + Venus)
SL  - Saturn League (Titan + Rhea)
NE  - Neptunian Empire (Triton + Nereid)

Ideas and stuff that wasn't possible to include:

I hope IC Devs will read it

All factions should be Tech, I also had the idea to limit the research tree in some way, but I noticed that each map will require it's own mod. So this idea was canceled, too.

The asteriod belt that seperates the inner from the outer planets, was also a hard work. I hoped to find a way to "paint" it in some way as a backdrop image or as an effect like the clouds or asteriods surrounding the gravity wells of planets. But there was no such way or haven't found it yet. So I created the "empty asteriod belt" entity to make shure that not all belts contain resources. Also I removed alot of the roids again. The picture above shows the current number of asteriods in the belt.

Finally to wanted to have a hint on the Advent, for the Sirrius Oddysey map. Adding the template itself was easy, but I hoped that you can give the milita a fixed name. Till now I found no way to do that.

Thats all for now,

join me again in "Making of Sins of a Solar Empire maps - Part 2": CB Mars Wars