One of the most important features of Shadow Wars is the galaxy layout. Rather than the traditional Dark Galaxy ‘anywhere-to-anywhere’ model, the Shadow Wars galaxy has a much more intuitive layout. The basic idea was to restict travel to specific wormholes between solar systems in the galaxy. This makes movement very linear and creates battlegrounds where the major travel route bottlenecks are located.
Writing a system like this seemed relatively easy, but once I started working on the project a few issues came up. The first was linking the systems together. The algorithm i wrote aimed at linking each system to its nearest 3 neighbours. This worked fine, but once i rendered the links on an image an issue was immediately obvious - some of the links crossed each other, messing up the visual experience. To solve it I checked ALL the existing links when adding a new one, not adding it if it crossed any existing link.
The second problem was not only a visual problem, but a show-stopper. If the galaxy was not densely enough packed with stars, isolated collections of stars would be generated, small islands of stars, not conneted to the rest of the galaxy. To solve this I added a special checking algorithm that identified all the islands of stars in the galaxy and connected them together by their nearest systems.
These initial algorithms and a demonstration applet were actually written last year. This code has been pulled out, cleaned, polished and improved, and now its ready to back the new Shadow Wars game. I added a little image-generator utility to the code so i could quickly generate galaxies and play around with the settings. Here are a few of the generated images to give you a little more of an idea of what can been done with the layout.
As there are two factions in this game, take note of the green/red - these colours are there to represent the starting positions of the players in the two factions.
The galaxy systems (including faction colours)
The galaxy systems (including factions & wormholes linking them)
There are quite a lot of options that will allow the galaxy to be made larger or smaller, increase/decrease density and number of lines (wormholes), and number of systems per faction. The above example has 2000 systems, 500 for each faction (red/green) and 1000 neutral in the middle. Here is another example with 600 systems, 200 for each faction and 200 neutral in the middle.
600 systems, 200 for each faction
600 systems, 200 for each faction (only two wormholes per system)
I’ll play around with the settings, perhaps make a really crazily large one and a tiny one for fun 
I liked it =D
Navigation is the real “juice” of strategy in these kinds of games imo.
The layout looks nice, the faction thing is also a nice idea.
I’m loving it