As someone who enjoys making custom systems, I think there are a few things that could be added to really make the system editor shine. 1. Ability to preview metal spots on a planet 2. Adjustable terrain obstructions (cracks, hills, mountains, pits, etc.) 3. Seed randomizer: Lock in every feature of a planet (radius, metal, water depth, etc) except for the seed, so that the terrain and obstacles are different with each play. This allows you to keep a well designed system fresh while preserving it's key features. 4. Bonus: Ability to preview crater size of various impacts
Separate seeds for terrain and metal distribution. For those moments, when you find awesome terrain, but metal distribution sucks.
You can kind of do this already by running the simulation; there's a simulated clock. I'm pretty sure it's slightly off from the actual in game timing, though. I created a map where planets smashed into each other and used the simulate button to guesstimate the timing, but it was off by at least several minutes when I played the game for real. As far as collision detection... I mean you can currently also just simulate and see if planets pass through each other, but it would also be nice to be able to tell if it was a glancing collision or an annihilation collision - with an accurate timestamp on top of that.
All of these have been suggested at various times. 1: From my understanding, the metal quantity and distribution is determined by the number of players. So you'd need to input the number of players to view metal quantities. 2: We've been asking for more interesting terrain for a while... 3: Yeah. I've been wanting that for a while. Would love it. 4: Yeah. Been wanting that for a while, but in game. Same goes for nukes.
I played a randomly generated system the other day that had a grand total of about 15 metal spots on each planet, and I tried to recreate it in the system editor by setting density to 1 and clusters to 0 (edit: 0 density = no metal regardless of cluster size). I found that even with 2 commanders, there were still quite a few metal spots on the planet, several times more than the randomly generated version. It would be nice to have the same level of control to create real bare-bones systems. As far as metal levels determined by the number of players, I would personally like to design a system for a certain number of players and thus have absolute control over the number of metal spots and the like.
How do you mean? Can't you do this already? Or do you mean after the game has started, like changing orbits with halleys?