Galaxy Forge - Beginners Guide

Published on February 4, 2008 By Zoomba In Sins Modding

Introduction

Note: Download the example map that accompanies this tutorial here.

Sins of a Solar Empire is an incredibly robust RT4X strategy game that allows you to grow your empire and conquer the galaxy. Games can last hours, weeks or even months. To start you off, Sins comes with dozens of pre-built maps, 3 sizes of randomized maps and a sophisticated in-game map generator that lets you define virtually every aspect of a map. Set your preferred planets, stars, distances etc and have the game automatically generate a map based on your choices. You can even share and distribute the map to friends, either via the Sins of a Solar Empire site, or directly in online multiplayer matches.

Unfortunately, the in-game designer doesn't give you complete control. You can't choose, for example, where you want a planet to be placed, or what you want it to connect to. You can't set how many militia forces are stationed there, or whether or not it's a homeworld, or if it's a pirate base. If you want to hand-craft your map, the in-game tools won't meet your needs.

Galaxy Forge is the answer to that problem. Part of the Forge Tools suite used by Ironclad Games to develop content for Sins of a Solar Empire, Galaxy Forge is a map editor tool that allows you to place stars, planets, travel lanes and more. You can build a map to your exact specifications. Do you want a multistar map with strategic choke points and no pirate base? No problem, just create it in Galaxy Forge and load it in the game. Galaxy Forge is a WYSIWYG editor, so placing planets, phase lanes, stars and more is as easy as a few clicks of the mouse.

While Galaxy Forge is incredibly easy to use for the amount of control it gives you, it's not fully an end-user-friendly tool. So, to get everyone up to speed as quickly as possible creating great maps to share with the community, I've created this short guide to building a complete map from start to finish..

WARNING: The editor has no undo feature, so be careful when you move elements or make any changes. Save early and often to make sure you don't accidentally delete something you've spent hours tweaking and customizing.

Getting Started with Galaxy Forge

Galaxy Forge is a stand-alone tool that does not use the main game to run. So you can install this on virtually any machine, even that old Pentium III you have stashed in the closet.

To start, make sure you have the Galaxy Forge tool downloaded to your PC. You can get a copy of the tools from the Sins of a Solar Empire website on the Downloads Page.

Once you've downloaded and extracted the tool, open up Galaxy Forge.exe. You will be greeted by the following screen (pictured right). When you start the Galaxy Forge tool, you begin with a default map already setup with the following:

One Star set to random color
Two terran home planets
Two default players (NewPlayer0 and NewPlayer1)

Before you get started adding planets, phase lanes and more stars, you probably want to decide if this is going to be a 2,4,6,8 or 10 player map.

To modify the number of players in your game, go to the Edit menu and select "Players..."

That will open up the Player editor tool. On a new map, you already have NewPlayer0 and NewPlayer1. Even if you want to make a two player map, you'll probably still want to edit the names of the players. Select a player from the left, and all of their editable options will appear in the box on the right.

For this simple guide, we'll focus on the following options:

Design Name - Name your race. This will be how the race is referenced in the editor only.
InGameName - The name of the race as displayed in-game if it belongs to the AI
StartingCredits - How many credits the player starts the game with.
StartingCrystal - How much crystal the player starts the game with.
StartingMetal - How much metal the player starts the game with.

I am going to stick with a simple two player map, and name the first player "Alcari Crusaders" and the second player "Vor Syndicate" and I'll leave them both with the default starting resources.

Naming Your Map & Filling in The Details

Now that you have a new map with your starting players setup, lets start to configure the big-picture details for the map. Click somewhere in the black space of the map to bring up the galaxy details in the settings panel on the right. This is where you'll make some default changes about your map and how the editor works. Defaults These are basic settings for new planets, players and stars that are added to the map.

New Planet Type - The default planet type for any new planet you add to the map.
New Player Starting Credits/Metal/Crystal - The starting resources assigned when you add a new player to the map.
New Star Radius - The radius of any new star system added to the map

I'm going to leave these as my defaults for this tutorial map. Display The options for how the map is displayed in the map selection screen within Sins of a Solar Empire.

Browse Description - Description of your map. Put a line or two about the map, lore etc. This is the creative description players will read in the map browser.
Browse Picture - The icon associated with your designed map in the map browser. This image should be a .tga file and placed in the Textures directory where you installed Sins of a Solar Empire.

For my tutorial map, I'm going to use the description "An example map created to go along with the Galaxy Forge guide"

For Browse Picture, I'm going to be lazy and just take one of the existing scenario images and reuse that. In this case I'll use: ScenarioPicture-Fulcrum (found in \Textures\ScenarioPicture-Fulcrum.tga)

Edit

These are settings to edit how the editor works with scrolling and zooming and shows your current zoom level. These settings will not impact the map itself.

Galaxy

These are some overall game settings for your map. They will impact how the game plays.

Is First Capital Ship Free - Sets whether or not the first capital ship is free for players to purchase.
Planet Artifact Density - Value 0-100. Controls what percentage of planets will have artifacts on them.
Planet Bonus Density - Value 0-100. Controls what percentage of planets will have bonuses on them
Players - How many players have been added to the map (this number is based off of the Player editor)
Recommended Players - Set what kind of game(s) the map is best suited for (i.e. solo, 2v2, 4v4, FFA etc.)
Scale - Controls how big the galaxy is. Large values will spread out your galaxy more.

To set the Recommended Players, click on the field, and you'll see a [...] button on the right. Click on that to bring up the Galaxy Scenario Game Type window.

By default, this is empty. Click "Add" and a new game type will be added. By default it's set to "Solo". However, if you select the item from the left, on the right you can change the type from a drop-down menu.

You can add multiple types if you have a large map you feel would work well for multiple configurations of players. A map designed for 10 players for example could be set for Solo, FFA, 5v5, 2v2v2v2v2 to fill all spots.

For the tutorial map, I think I'll leave the first capital ship as free, but bump up the % of planets with artifacts from the default 15 to 50 (I want this to be a rich map), but I'll leave the bonus density alone. I'm also going to designate my map as a solo only map since it's just two players.

Home Planet

These are the default settings for any planet you designate as a homeworld in your game. Setting any of these to 10 locks it, preventing the player from upgrading it further.

Exploration - How much of the planet has been explored. You explore planets to discover artifacts and planet bonuses.
Infrastructure - How much infrastructure the planet starts with. Building this up helps defend your planet against bombardment
Logistical - How much logistical infrastructure the planet starts with. Logistics limit the number of orbital structures you can place around a planet.
Population - How much population support your planet starts with. This limits how many people can live on a planet.
Tactical - How much tactical infrastructure your planet starts with. This limits the number of defense placements you can build around a planet.

For the tutorial map, I'm going to leave these alone. Ok, we have successfully configured all the meta details for our map. We've set description, picture, game type and messed with the distribution of artifacts. Now that all of the fluff details are out of the way, it's time to get down to the business of making the map!

Making the Map: Adding Planets, Stars and Phase Lanes

Ok, now for the fun part, actually drawing out the game map! For this part you'll be focusing almost exclusively on the map window, instead of the details window like the previous section. Here you'll place, move and connect up all the planets and stars you want to add to your map.

To start, lets look at our map as it stands

We have one star, two home worlds on opposite ends of the system, and that's it. There isn't even a phase lane connecting anything so if you loaded this map right now, you wouldn't be able to travel anywhere. The planets were auto-assigned to the two players we edited earlier.

Before we get started editing the map, there are a few controls that will make life much easier when trying to move around the map:

Panning The Map - Hold the middle mouse button and drag in any direction.
Zooming in and out - Scroll Wheel. When zooming in, it will center on wherever your mouse cursor is.

Now that that's out of the way, lets add a planet! There are two ways to do this:

Double-click anywhere within the radius of the star
Right-click anywhere within the radius of the star and select "Add Planet"

The planet added will have the default settings you defined when you were tweaking the overall map settings. So for this tutorial, it will auto-place a Terran planet.

I'm going to place a handful of planets around the map....

So now that I have all of my planets laid out approximately where I want them, it's time to connect them all together. To do this, right click on any planet, select "Add Connection" and then left click on the planet you want to connect with. Now let me connect up all of my planets...

At this point I have a fully functional game map. I could save this, load it up in the game and play it, but it would be a little bit boring considering all I have are Terran type planets, no pirates and just one other player to fight.

Editing Planets, Stars & Making Things Interesting

Every planet object on my map right now are terran planets with nothing special about them. We also have a star with the color set to random. Oh, and we haven't named a single planet, the star, or anything. Sure it's a technically complete map, but it just doesn't feel right. Here's a snapshot of the map loaded in the game:

The game will automatically name planets and stars you don't name, so technically you don't have to worry about that detail, but there's a lot more you probably want to tweak and fiddle with.

First off, having a few dozen Terran planets just doesn't look right. This is space, and habitable M class worlds are supposed to be rare right? Well, lets change things up a bit. To start with, we'll select the planet directly below the Vor Syndicate's home world.

For editing the planet, you're going to be focusing on the details panel again.

Advanced

SpawnProbability - The chance that a planet exists in the game. 1 means always, 0 means never. You can set the value between the two for a % chance.
StartingUpgradeForArtifact - Controls what level of artifact upgrade the planet starts with
Starting UpgradeForCivilianModules - Controls what level of civilian module upgrade the planet starts with
StartingUpgradeForPopulation - Controls what level of population upgrade the planet starts with
StartingUpgradeForTacticalModules - Controls what level of tactical module upgrade the planet starts with.

Items

UseDefaultTemplate - Do you want to use the predefined planet template for this planet? This just gives you the standard structures and resources if it's an owned world, or if it's an empty planet occupied by militia.

Misc

Position - The X,Y coordinates of the planet on your map. Only edit these if you want very precise planet placement.

Name

Design Name - The name of the planet as displayed in the Galaxy Forge
InGame Name - What you want the planet to be named in the game.

Ownership

IsHomePlanet - Is this a homeworld?
Owner - Which player owns the planet at the start of the game.

Properties

Type - What type of planet do you want this to be? Terran, Ice, Gas Giant etc.

For a quick-and-dirty map, the only field you really have to play with is "Type" in the properties section. From there you can select any standard planet type programmed into the game. I will now go around my map, changing up the planet types to give me a slightly more interesting map to play on.

I now have a map with volcanic, ice, desert and terran planets. Various asteroids, Plasma & Magentic Storms, even a Pirate Base. This map pretty much covers everything and if you want to just do the basics to build a map that is playable with default settings, you're done. Just save the file and hand it out to your friends, or upload it to the Sins of a Solar Empire website for everyone to download.

There's a lot more under the covers that you can play with and tweak, but this guide was just meant to get your feet wet and familiarize you with the basic, bare-minimum steps needed to make a map.

And always remember you can open any map that comes with the game in Galaxy Forge to see exactly how Ironclad built each of the maps, what special options they used etc. It's perfectly alright to borrow heavily from great maps when you're trying to figure out how to get a planet to start with a specific artifact, or to give players a quick start by giving them a handful of ships to start out with.

If you have any more questions, be sure to visit the Sins of a Solar Empire Modding Forums. Players and developers alike will hopefully be able to answer any question you might have.

FAQ

Like with every mod tool, there are a handful of "gotchas" or places that aren't quite clear enough. As people encounter problems/ask for help, we'll update this FAQ section with questions and answers we think everyone should know about when using the Galaxy Forge.

I tried to load the map in my game, but I immediately get a victory/defeat screen after loading. What's going on?
Make sure you save the galaxy file in the Galaxy folder wherever you installed Sins of a Solar Empire (i.e. c:\Program Files\Stardock Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Galaxy). Do NOT save it in your local settings/app data directory. Maps created with Galaxy forge will not load properly from that folder.

Comments (Page 80)

1186

avery4149

on Jun 11, 2016

Hi, I'm trying to create my own map using the galaxy forge, and although everything work out fine, but there's one thing is missing and I still can't figure it out how to do it myself, and the problem is: How do you make a planet colonized by AI computer? And I'm not only talking about having militia flying around the planet, but actual colonized planet that you can invade. A detailed step by step guide will have helped. Thanks!

1187

Stant123

on Jun 11, 2016

High_Guard

reply 1185

What about modifying what shows up in the Group Editor? I tried to put in a screenshot of what I mean but forum didn't post it.

What shows up in the group editor is what's listed in the GalaxyScenarioDef file. In order to update the forge to the most current version of the game, all you have to do is copy this file out of your game, and drop it into the forge folder replacing the one that is in there. In the early days of sins back in 2008, there were a lot of things missing, but most of us modders fixed that problem pretty quickly and the devs followed suit. In the case of modding, you need your modded version dropped in, but it will force anyone else playing the map to also have the modded file also. Usually not a problem, but can be to those trying to use it for other mods or unmodded sins when things selected aren't in their game.

avery4149

reply 1186

The very first thing you need to do is what I answered above if you haven't already. Using the most up to date galaxyscenariodef file (referred to as the gsd file from now on) is essential to having the most options available to you in the editor.

Not 100% what you're asking since you can invade all planets except your own... But I'll give it a shot anyway. Keep in mind, I haven't played sins, much less messed with this stuff in the last 4 years, so what I say is to the best of my knowledge but may not be perfectly accurate anymore as I stopped during rebellion's development.

In the forge main window, click edit, in the drop down box, select players. This is where you should start when making maps as this allows you to set up not only the number of available players for the map, but also what each starts with, and if they are allied right away. If you select a player, you'll see a planet count listed. If it says 0, then that player loses at game start, a common issue for people new to forge. You can't fix that from here, but it's important to know. You can always add or remove players later if your needs change as you build your map. In my opinion, it's better to have 4 players set up and ready to go before you make the map, rather then having to go back after you're done and redo options like assigning planets and stuff you could have set up while building the map.

Back to the main window, assuming you've added and set up the players how you want them... Here, you can start adding stars and planets and connecting them. Something to note here, do not connect the stars to other stars, the game does this automatically with a third connection type (interstellar lane) that is not available in the forge. Using either of the other two options overrides the third option and makes it so a player or AI does not need to research interstellar travel to travel between stars.

Anyway, as you're adding planets, in the toolbox (the second window that opened up when you started forge) there are a lot of things listed there. As a new map maker, you can safely ignore most of it. Things like spawn probability are only important for map randomization so it doesn't have the same choke points and pathways every time you play it. Sometimes it nice not knowing if a planet is going to be there or not, but not something to mess with until you're experienced in map making. So ignore the Advanced and Misc sections.

As for the rest of the options I start at the bottom and work my way up. Properties - Type. Set up the type of planet you have. Depending on the gsd file you put in the forge folder, you may only have the default options, or you may have so many, your eyes explode. Next set of options is ownership, which is what is the most important to your question so I will bold it to draw our attention here. Owner is where you select who gets the planet at game start. It is exactly at this time where it's really nice to have already set up the players before you started. If you haven't, you will only see two possible players, 0 and 1 (basically players 1 and 2 in game). If you're making a 4 player map, you will have 4 options here, players 0, 1, 2, and 3. Use this option to assign planets to each player so they can start off with more then the default. Ishomeplanet sets up the starting point for whatever owner you selected. Each player can only have 1. In the name section, leave the design name alone, but you can add a in game name so that your ice planets can have names like "Hoth? Should be called Colth, right?" and when you get there in the game, you will see that.

That's all for the generic map making... But there is more you can do to have fun with the planets specifically.

Select a planet and right click on it and select edit, you get a big menu where you can give them lots of good things at game start.

Lets go over the boxes. The first to the left is a template box, at the bottom is all of the predefined templates already set up in the gsd file. You can choose to use one as a starting point or start fresh. The easiest thing to do is just select something from here and go with it, but that requires you to have a pretty good idea of what's set up in the gsd file. Most people don't, even those of us that spent years modding can't recall every little thing listed, so we make our own templates in the gsd file and use those, or we go about customizing each planet individually. When you have a lot of planets, templates are great. If not, we move onto the more advanced way of customizing, which means ignoring this box and moving onto the next one.

The second box (from the left) is the group manager. At the bottom of this box you need to click 'add'. You see a selection that says 'Always (0 items)' shows up. You are now done with this box. For now. Most likely.

Now you go to the third box called Group Editor. The top box, you can change that to anything except planetownerisrace. That's a feature not used and semi-crashes the forge. If it's for a planet you have assigned to a player, leave it at always, and in the box below. spawn these items for, select the player you gave ownership of the planet to. Leaving it as planet owner should mean that any time anyone colonizes the planet, the stuff respawns. This is exploitable, like if I need resources, I can sell everything off, abandon the planet, recolonize and get everything right back. Not an option you want to give people, so just set it to the original owner. In the right box, you have all of the options listed in the gsd file. Select one and click add. It'll show up in the left box and should then show up at game start. Go down the list and add what you want... Or not. When you're done, hit Ok at the bottom, that window will close and you can move on to other planets. One thing to note, you may need to uncheck use default template on the bottom left before you close out the window. I don't recall ever doing that, but like I said at the beginning of this, it's been a while and I can't be held as 100% reliable at this point.

Anyway, that should do it. Enjoy.

1188

avery4149

on Jun 12, 2016

Thank you for your help. But sorry to bother you a bit more. Can you have an AI militia colonize a planet like the setting you'll have in the in-game forge mode where if you drag the scale of "Neutral colony", you can set the probability of how many planet is colonized in your map? These AI militia are not main game players, they will not attack you, but when you reach their planet, you'll see that they have a large fleet of ships, and structures built. And the planet colonized by the militias.

1189

Stant123

on Jun 12, 2016

Last I recall, the militia own everything not claimed by a player, so you don't need to have them colonize anything. To create a large militia army, just go back to my last paragraph in my previous post about the group editor. Instead of leaving it as always, change the top box to PlanetOwnerIsMilitia and add any of the stuff from the box on the right side. That should allow you to build a base for the militia that players will have to fight through.

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