Random games use to be just random start position for each house.

I tried a random and found rebels taking over all the planets very early in the game and facing 20 high units too be not fun.

So what are future plans for random games?

Ok this might be a bit more complicated of an issue because there are a couple issues at play. First, the difference between the Historical Galaxy, and Random Galaxies, and the Galactic Difficulty Level. The historical galaxy has an unchanging set of starting units in each structure on each planet. This doesn't change with difficulty level. This means the Historical galaxy is actually the easiest galaxy possible, no matter what difficulty level you choose, because the Historical galaxy mostly uses low level units on nearly all of the planets (there are exceptions though). Random galaxies are way different and generate random structures and units in those structures. The number of units is based on the Galactic Difficulty Level. If all players are on beginner, then structures on random planets will have 4-5 units. On average, 8-10. On Ridiculous, 18-20. The same goes for ruins. Also, because of the large amount of randomness, you can have very high level units appear in a "beginner" random galaxy (but at least there aren't many of them compared to ridiculous!). Therefore, my observation is that a beginner random galaxy is harder than the historical galaxy on any difficulty level.

Now about "Galactic Difficulty Level" for random galaxies. It's actually the average difficulty of all players. So if you set your own difficulty to beginner, and the 4 AI houses to Difficult, then you'll probably see 12-14 units populated in each rebel structure. You might not expect this, but that's how it works in 1.5. If you set your own difficulty to "Ridiculous" and the 4 AI houses to "beginner", then you'll probably see 6-7 units in each structure. So because of the...unique...design of how the galactic difficulty works in 1.5 EFS, players might not see random galaxies play out how they expect.

I spent a lot of time on Nova 2.4 to make it so that random galaxies are generated not just with fewer units as in vanilla, but also that the units selected on lower difficulties are lower level units as well. So selecting lower difficulties has more meaning in Nova 2.4 compared to vanilla. You can check it out if you'd like to see the difference.

So far I like the Random game on Beginner.


Crazy activities and forces are at work making it difficult .... but .... the rewards for being adventurous can help maintain the balance.

Early in the game (before taking over my first planet), a Symbiot invasion fleet came passing nearby by my core system. On my first expansion planet I encountered fanatics with Plague Bombs, merchants and Dire Wolves making my invasion experience quite tense.

On the other hand, back on Aragon, I raided some Ruins and found a mixed Vau force that included a fantastic Vau War Tower.

I defeated this stack, making the War Tower surrender and then the Ruins yielded 2 Cadiz Dreadnots and a relic of stack strength.

My political maneuvers got me the Imperial Fleet ministry on the next turn - so I now have a massive fleet to combat the Symbiots and the bizarre forces appearing against my expeditionary force.

With all that being said, I can't see myself playing Random on anything else besides Beginner.


Has anyone beat Random on anything higher?

Nice - I also modded my game to make advanced hover technology and Psychics far more powerful and resilient.

This helps against the powerful mish mash of random odd-balls that seem to ooze out of every crack ;)

Wow ...

So ... After finally pacifying Aylon, we moved onto Madoc as it looked to have many opportunities for mining bonuses.


I dropped outside the main city cluster and had my Tracker sneak up on one of the cities.

Lo and behold !

20 units in one Chemical factory : Heavy Infantry, PTS Guns, Plague Bombs, a full air force etc ....

No wonder none of the other houses have made their mark on the galactic map.


Does 20 units in one city for Rebels seem intentional ? Sounds a bit at odds with the logic above. (this is on beginner)

On a positive note, on the same planet, I found a fully stocked Agora manned by Merchants - time to replenish those electronics and chemical stocks !

It was with 1.5.

Are 1.5 save games compatible with 1.51 ?

I'm guessing that in either case, the beginning plague bombs would not go away. That's ok, I have ways of dealing with them.

I'll report back on the rest of the force distribution on that planet once I return back to my Hazat / Random Game.

At the moment, the historical galaxy with my noble Hawkwoods has drawn me back to my ever lasting crusade of eliminating all things Decados in the Known Worlds ....

Yes 1.5 save games are compatible with 1.51. The recommendation is to copy your save file to the MOD/LEGACY/SAV folder and activate the legacy “mod”. Because 1.51 made a lot of changes to the units, things will get kind of weird if you drop it into 1.51 vanilla. 1.51 has a lot of other bug fixes as well, so i recommend this over sticking with 1.5.

And yes correct, the plague bombs wont go away by just loading the save in 1.51. The starting units in a random galaxy are generated at galaxy creation.