Quoting sirdrannik, reply 2
And what about a custom map that I created via the ingame Map Designer? How do I make it competitive without bonuses?
In the MapDesigner of Galaxy Forge, you may notice some planet types that have the word "Fair" after them, like "TerranFair". These are the planets used by the competitive maps, and if you use them in your map they also will not have any planet bonuses. I don't know if this is an option in the MapDesigner but the Galaxy Forge also has a "PlanetBonusDensity" option that if you set to zero will prevent planet bonuses from appearing.
No, actually that's not enough! I ran into that problem when I was trying to make my "QuickFrontliners" map as balanced as possible. Despite using only the "Fair" versions of moon and roid, they still ended up with random bonuses. The only way to remove such bonuses completely, even from "Fair" planets is to make sure you have set:
planetArtifactDensity 0.000000
planetBonusDensity 0.000000
in the beginning of the galaxy file. These lines affects all planets, "Fair" or not.
The Fair flavors of the planets simply have their own entity definition (as if they were completely different planets); mostly they are copies of the originals but using a fixed number of resources, e.g. a VolcanicFair always has 4 metal extractors, the Fair roid always has 2 crystal + 1 metal, while the Fair moon is configured the other way around with 2 metal and 1 crystal.
Oddly enough, not all Fair planets even have this simple feature of fixed resource counts. The known exceptions [as of 1.82.5006] are: Oceanic, Ferrous and Greenhouse. The "Fair" versions of those still have a randomized/range of resource extractors. I'm not sure if that'a a bug or is by design. So if you want those on a truly fair/balanced map, you currently need to mod them. Also, the Ship Graveyard (which is colonizable) lacks a Fair version.
There are also Fair versions of some non-colonizable wells (e.g Gas Giant, Plasma Storm, or Space Junk) and these are configured correctly for a constant number of resources, but not all non-colonizables have such a version, even when they'd benefit from one, e.g. Radiation Field or Ice Field lack a Fair version but have interesting in-game effects that require (or enable) special tactics so MP would surely benefit from Fair versions of these two.
Finally, if you want a truly balanced map, you have to pay attention even to the placement of the resource extractors and the initial cluster of factories. Unfortunately, precise positions of structures within gravity wells can't be specified in the galaxy file. The only way to get something reasonable is by reloading the map until you hare happy with the config on all sides, save the game and later play from that save game (which unfortunately locks in a few other things like races used and so forth.) If you think stuff like positioning of the structures in the homeworld well doesn't matter... my tests have shown otherwise. Specifically, if the starting homeworlds are 3 jumps away from each other with 2 roids in between (a fairly typical setup in 5v5s), the side that gets its factories cluster closer to the roid while the enemy gets it to the back [relative to the enemy] will end up with one less extractor for a considerable period of time (5 min or more). The relative placement of the resource extractors and factories in the homeworld is even more important. If they all fall within the radius of a repair platform (but the other side doesn't get so lucky), it can result in 1-2 structures more structures that the unlucky side loses and has to rebuild (after several minutes of being denied constructors respawn) in the initial mutual raids on homeworlds.
