A HUGE idea is to build in a feature such as they use in ICE9 building games. Somehow he's able to create zones for aliens. One race only flys in certain sectors, another race flies in still others, and they can be seperated by a neutral zone where no aliens are present. If we could set up zones like this in the games without having to do all the creative scripting and mapping they do setting up these games, I can see it being a huge hit.

To elaborate, this is not something that I did, but rather something that Anyjoe did back when he was sysop, and if I recall it was a PITA to set up. I have my notes on how he did it, but I know it involved multiple bubbles where the only way to get to them was via fedspace, and the class 0 ports, but the warps out of the class 0 ports had big alien planets guarding them, so that the aliens of another species could not go in that way... I have wanted to recreate it, but time has not been on my side.

It wouldn't be very hard for me to allow ops to enter alien avoids...

If it were possible to put the aliens into large bubbles, and set them to avoid the entrance(s) to that bubble, it might work.

They already use avoids internally, so it would just be a matter of providing a tool for listing avoids in the editor. I think that would be a flexible, powerful tool for controlling alien behaviors.

I concur. Now the question is, if we were to list a class 0 as an avoid sector, would that override their behavior of going there? This is the main problem anyjoe had in developing his map.

Another powerful tool along these lines is being able to designate a sector as being homespace and homeworld sector for a particular alien race. I think that is another important piece of this puzzle for controlling where alien races go, especially in a heavily modded map.

I could allow you to assign homespace sectors just as easily as avoids. Both are just internal arrays of sectors. Well, avoids is a bitmap of all possible sectors, but homespace sectors are stored in an array. That array is generated at bigbang, but there's no reason it can't be extended. Maybe even modified, though that could be more tricky.

Of course, none of this would currently carry into a new game if you rebang with a new seed. This is what the "little bang" feature is about, providing a way to randomize a map without really changing its structure, so you can create a game with this kind of complexity, then send it out for others to use.