As in the title I would much prefer to have the old 'swirl' galaxy back, the current map is just a clusterfuck and it can get rather difficult to find a specific group of galaxies just by dragging the map (I don't know if that's just me being whiney) but a larger version of the swirl in my opinion would be much better.

Clusters!

I would love a 4x Swirl whit several stairs that go up to wildspace and then to peril, Peril and earthforce would be conected to all of willdspace how ever
wildspace would have some borders where there are no jump to the other side

What Jeff did to the universe map is the worst thing he could ever do if he wanted this game to be a competitive game. I consider myself playing a single player game as of right now in Star Sonata.

Reduce Cele garden whit 50%

make W1 Cele pvp area

relocate FM,Ring,GM to w0 EF space but make them buildable P2P only

increse w1-2 in Wildspace by reducing W3

Make Wildspace divided into 5 or so boxes that arent linked exept thrue WS sanctuary but whit several entrances along the outer edge of the box and 2 in the middle of eatch box

I like and dislike aspects of it. The old design was very cramped in the sense of how many teams you had a chance to border (which opens up the >small< chance of BvB) but this design is to big and to crazy.

Difficult balance for sure.

personally i think that it should just be multiple "copies" of the original map layout(because it was awesome), with juxtas for each "upper" level depending on what warp they're in

so warp 0 would have juxtas to the outer areas in the first layer, warp 1 in the first layer would have juxtas to the second layer, warp 2 in the first layer would have juxtas to the third and so on

it would turn the "noob" area into a thoroughfare for the higher level players, and with all the below t20 content in the first layer it allows large buildable areas without making it too much of a hassle for new players to find the special galaxies they need to get to for skills and missions

and maybe ontop of that, have an anatolia layer which can only be reached through the juxtas at the edges of the fourth layer

so there would be 5 layers, 1EF/buildable, 3 wild, and 1 perilous with anatolia, maybe even restrict which AI are in each layer, so players can have more choice in what they fight (especially when leveling)

make it in a huge 8 shape. top of the 8 and bottom of the 8 as the highest DF area xD

I guess I will make a post on this. I'll start off with explaining how I play now in this layout, compared with how I played in the old layout.

This universe I have taken an outpost galaxy, and two galaxies that I keep unowned. The closest bordering galaxy of my main three galaxies is some 5-10 jumps away. I feel that I am left alone in a big nowhere, and I could basically choose all the tier 3 commodities that I wanted. Due to this I get insane stacks of tier 2-3 commodities, and I do no longer have to feel that my galaxies are threatened at all. As I said, single player mode.

Back with the old layout on the other hand, I had to plan out well how I wanted to play, and I pretty much had to team up with other players to build safely in wild space. It was still a lot of free space to build in back then, and a lot of low level teams found those after some time. You would spend a lot of time investigating who your neighbors were, and how you could ensure that your border galaxies were safe, and grant that your team space had a good layout with as few weak links as possible.

So what I would like to see is the universe layer to be given a shape that isn't a circle or a box. It should have a spiral or a swirl, or something like that, and it should not be given a size based on how Jeff thinks things will evolve. It should be like it always was - small and compact, but it should of course take the active player base size into account.

If it stays like this tho, I'll just keep playing my single player mode game as I have no issues with that as I can handle everything on my own. But I know many players who doesn't wanna play that kind of a game.

I'm with a lot of what swift.kill said. Make celest jam packed, and give them PvP. As for wild space, I'd like to see it as the swirl like it used to be, the idea of a funnel where the commods get better the further into the funnel you go sounds like a good idea to me cause it makes people more willing to PvP over the good commods, rather than being spread out and all chilled, no worry of other people attacking.

You do realize that SBP could potentially sit in both arms and lock both down?

*Le newb: Ah, team, here we are, DF180.
*The next galaxy over in DF190 is owned by SBP*

Ok.

The old map was very restrictive, very competitive, and very predatory. As a rule, these factors will always limit the size of the playerbase, and we were full. Yes, now we have a little too much space... but I think since we transitioned into this model of universe layout, the community has grown more than in the 2-3 years preceding the change.

There is nothing fundamentally flawed with this map design that prevents competition, or defense against such.