I dont have any other map related mods. I tried testing it on the small size, but the starts definately arent evenly spaced out. Some of the empires are spawning in very isolated locations, while others are spawning relatively normal.

I tried tweaking the values in the map files that came with the mod but i cant get any good results with them. Any ideas?

This screenshot was taken with small size, 5 AI empires, 2 fallen empires and 2 marauders : https://i.imgur.com/stn7AMX.jpg

I went went over this in PMs with @Question, in case it's useful to someone in the future here is my wordvomit from the conversation:

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Fallen empires and marauders don't follow the same spawning system as normal empires, they are placed after normal empire and the game will try to fit them in where they can. NCS works by putting all empires in the same cluster and increasing the distance between empires to be essentially the same as the radius of the galaxy.

In early versions, I set the distance between empires to something significantly larger to force them as far as possible away from each other, but this prevent FEs from spawning altogether on many maps

What this basically means is that normal empires will spawn at least a certain distance away from other normal empires, and FEs and Marauders will usually be inbetween. There is still no way to make the FE/Marauder spawning interact with normal empire cluster spawning, as far as I know

And without that, some normal empires will be close to FEs/Marauders, and others will not

For the sake of the visual, here's your screenshot with the empires that NCS controls marked: https://i.imgur.com/jo2DHwj.jpg


[...]


Yeah, something like https://i.imgur.com/egWxEeM.jpg

The reason it doesnt do that is because there is no maximum distance between empires, just a minimum and ideal. It really only cares about spacing things far enough away, and doesnt really care to make them even

The even spread only happens if there are enough empires to fill the galaxy

The spread is unavoidably uneven if there are fewer empires proportional to the galaxy size

This is something else that I wish I could have more influence over, but unfortunately the minimum and ideal distances between empires is global for all galaxy sizes

So I have to pick a distance that works well enough for huge and tiny

I have posted about it in the modder feedback/wishlist section of the Paradox forums, but nothing has come of it

It's one of the same reasons why the mod conflicts with more mods than it should. If the blocks and files were set up in a different way, I could use the normal modding techniques to reduce conflicts

But even with 2.4's dependencies system, either NCS or whatever other galaxy mods someone has will break

I have tried lots of things, like moving the base code blocks to the size files to use different values for different sizes, but it seems like the galaxy and setup_scenarios files dont follow the normal modding rules

I have asked other mod authors if they have any idea how to improve these various issues, but no luck

The "ideal distance" between empires (the global value that applies to all sizes) is almost the same as the width of a small galaxy, and the minimum distance is about a quarter of the width of a small galaxy. if this was any bigger, chances are small galaxies would get worse but larger galaxies would look better. If it was any smaller, big galaxies with few empires would end up not being very spread out at all

Anyway, that's the rundown. It's been a headache for me, but I think I've found a satisfactory compromise after a lot of tweaking. If you find some values that work better or some way to improve any of this, let me know!

The fundamental purpose of the mod is to not spawn empires in clusters, and at least that much works.

I cant get the mod to install correctly. My friend and I are trying to use this in our MP games. All other mods we use we have no problems with. THis one though after installing we are on different checksums. We have made sure all our mods are in the same load order and both have all the exact same mods installed and enabled. We have tried many things to determine where the problem is and try to fix but we have found it is something not allowing the mod to install on my system correctly. We can tell this because after adding this mod I get the same checksum as before it was installed. When my friend loads it he gets a different one. Obviously i should be getting the same checksum as him. We both removed the mod and we have no problems.

The main thing I have noticed is that I can see the mod get installed into \SteamLibrary\steamapps\workshop\content\281990 when I subscribe. It does not get installed into Documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris\mod , where all my other mods do.

I have tried turning off my antivirus, setting exceptions in it to ignore both folders, reset folder security in windows to allow full access to "Everyone", verified game files. Any thoughts why I cant get this to install/load correctly?

The way Steam downloads mods is mysterious magic. It seems to have gotten more reliable in the past few months, but I don't understand it.

When you say you removed the mod, were you just unsubscribing or were you also deleting files? Try this:

1. Unsubscribe
   
2. Delete the 281990 folder from Steam\workshop\content
   
3. Delete the 281990 folder from Documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris\workshop\content
   
4. Subscribe
   
5. Start and stop the game, whatever you have to do to get the workshop content to download

When you tried to remove the mod, something may have been left behind and Steam decided "nah something's already there, don't need to do anything."

I hope that works. I am not very familiar with how to fix workshop issues.

Worst case scenario, I can send you the plain mod files (or your friend can grab them from his download) and you can put them in your Documents* folder. It wont get automatically updated from Steam that way, but it will work.

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*: https://i.imgur.com/F5UmS3L.png

Originally posted by Taw:

The way Steam downloads mods is mysterious magic. It seems to have gotten more reliable in the past few months, but I don't understand it.

When you say you removed the mod, were you just unsubscribing or were you also deleting files? Try this:

1. Unsubscribe
   
2. Delete the 281990 folder from Steam\workshop\content
   
3. Delete the 281990 folder from Documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris\workshop\content
   
4. Subscribe
   
5. Start and stop the game, whatever you have to do to get the workshop content to download

When you tried to remove the mod, something may have been left behind and Steam decided "nah something's already there, don't need to do anything."

I hope that works. I am not very familiar with how to fix workshop issues.

Worst case scenario, I can send you the plain mod files (or your friend can grab them from his download) and you can put them in your Documents* folder. It wont get automatically updated from Steam that way, but it will work.

__
*: https://i.imgur.com/F5UmS3L.png

tried all that you suggested already. Ill have my friend send me the mod file. Hopefully that will work. If it does I'll post back here to give an update. Hopefully it might help someone else down the road.

Having my friend send me the file and put it in the folder worked. Just gonna suck if you update the mod alot, then ill have to have him send me a new file every time, but oh well, at least it works.

I thought I responded to you!

The mod is rarely updated, and when it is updated it is almost always just a compatibility flag update. Even if the launcher yells at you for the mod being out of date, it will almost always still work.