NOSTAR

[pd]

-Added a NOSTAR star type. This does / can be used to represent a location in space - a system - that doesn't have a star.

Geoff, could you elaborate on the motivation for this? Is it so that stars can be destroyed? What effect would this have on planets?

[Geoff the Medio]

This will allow stars to be destroyed.

More importantly, it also means that systems can start without any stars in them. This is a bit of an experiment that I'm hoping will make exploration and galactic geography more interesting. Now, instead of every system having a star in it, there can be clusters of stars close together with no stars for several systems / jumps around, or isolated stars, or other variations. There are also a lot more nooks and crannies and places to hide ships or other things (as they become available in the game / content) between systems. The geography is somewhat more like a Civ game, in a sense, in that there is more open space between colonies (cities) than might otherwise occur.

I've modified the universe generation tables to make it very unlikely for systems with no star to have any planets, although it can still occur. Also, if starting a game with very few systems, there's a decent chance your homeworld could be located in a system with no star (although this may be considered a bug...).

None of this will necessarily need to be the default configuration, and it would be relatively easy to add a universe generation option that allows to set the ratio of systems with stars, with the range going back up to 100% as it was before. I'd just like to see how it affects the early game and exploration.

[dalmedya]

This will allow stars to be destroyed.

Neat.

I'd just like to see how it affects the early game and exploration.

Right now, they are SO FRUSTRATING, mostly due to both how common they are, and the fact that infrastructure and supply count them as a normal system, and there's no way to counteract this by deploying a colony/outpost because they (almost) never have a planet to colonise. It doesn't help that the lack of colonies means you can't build anything there. Right now, they are nothing but a waste of space.
I posted some stuff in this thread; Installations would fix the infrastructure/supply thing, and make NOSTARs more interesting.
In the meantime, I'm just going to reduce my BaseStarTypeDist value from 60 to 20.

[eleazar]

I lowered it to 40 in revision 4246. So v.3.17 should have them at that level.

The results seem more reasonable, but of course vary a lot-- maybe between 1/3rd and 1/5th. Previously it could be close to 1/2.