How will map selection work? Can we play on a map preset? Can we play on the same world seed? Is there a way to see what is in the universe before the game starts? Is there a way to change what planets we start out with? I'm looking for Uber answers but if someone else knows please fill me in
It's been mentioned in a few livestreams that they plan on allowing seeds to be saved/shared. He was also talking about keeping the system set up in a way that if you load an old seed (maybe generated during the beta) they would like it to load correctly down the line (maybe several months later when they've patched and it's version 1.2 or something). This would normally be a broken feature since the generator values have changed, think Minecraft whenever it got a new block. The other take is that there would be standard generation parameters. so you could simply select "3 players, multi world" and launch. I'd say it's safe to assume both will be present, though how useful/complete either setup will be is just a guess.
To answer the rest of your questions, it's been confirmed that you can basically build your solar system with the planets/asteroids that you want. Again though, how complete and useful it will actually be will depend mostly on how much time they manage to work on it before release.
The potential for how many maps we can have is insanely cool. It's going to be better than FAs modding ability, I think. It would probably be worth it if there were a few pre-made solar systems released with the game to simplify skirmishes, but then allowing people to share seeds in game, or start skirmishes with their own seeds, would be a great feature.
