Harpo--yes.
I had only the initial "random home world" at the beginning. 2-3 hours in, I had 8-15 planets and they were running only on their home world.
Giving them the second world was an attempt to give them more space for their orbitals. Next thing I'm going to try is making all homeworlds terran or desert.
@ Xathos, No. Not too much 'crap.'
The entire premise of the map is that there are essentially 17 factions.
8 neutral planet clusters/factions (who are holding the super planets and the super planet middle fingers), 8 playable factions, and then pirates.
Each player zone has a random start world, one ice, one volcanic, a forest, a terran, and a military planet at each end. Seven worlds to start.
Each independent zone has a relic world, and 3 random moons. There are one way wormholes that go directly to the player homeworlds on either side. Sounds cheap, but considering you have to plow through 16+ Capital ships, and anywhere between 2 and 4 starbases along with all of the associated defenses and screening elements. It is intended to not be easy to take those worlds, where there is guaranteed to be at least one artifact in that area--but there are dickmoves in there too. It may not be worth it to go lose half of your fleet to get to it.
16 Military (8 Moon/8 Huge)
8 City
8 Terran
8 Random Home
8 Forest
8 Volcanic
8 Ice
8 Relic
24 Random Moons
1 Gas 'Super' Giant
1 Ship Graveyard
1 Ancient Citadel
40 Deep Space Dwarfs
8 Asteroid Space Junk Random
1 Pirate
I realize I can't make the AI be smart enough to use the obvious here, but you would think that it would be smart enough to at least colonize the closest worlds--I mean its smart enough to clear all of the neutrals out. I've even seen them sending attack fleets to take out the independently colonized worlds!
Is that part of the problem? Do they see the neutrals as a serious threat or something?