One of the questions I get asked the most is whether it's possible to add more maps to Galactic War. And let's be honest, once you've played a few wars you've seen all the built-in systems more than once. Not only that, but many people have a real desire to experience more multi-planet than it offers out of the box.

A recommendation in the past has been to use Classic Systems for Galactic War. But I don't recommend this any more. Those systems were from an earlier era when the system editor was less powerful, asteroids didn't exist, and we didn't really understand what made for a fun orbital map.

Now I recommend Shared Systems for Galactic War, a mod which lets you load in Uber's systems, your systems, and systems out of any map pack you lay your hands on.

Go into Community Mods from the main menu. Click the Available tab and search for "gw". Select Shared Systems for Galactic War and choose to install it.

When you go into Galactic War you'll notice something different.



In bottom left you now choose what systems to load into Galactic War. By default it has selected Uber Entertainment's systems, and you see there are 26 of them. Below that is My Systems, which would load any systems you have created or imported. Default Systems and onwards are categories on the Shared Systems server. These are areas which anyone can upload to (default systems) or are restricted to specific individuals (everything else). I recommend against using these categories for two reasons:

• Many of the systems are old and out-of-date
  
• The Shared Systems server is often offline, or when online is slow to load the systems

In the screenshot above we see a 0 next to Default Systems and the go to war button is greyed out. This is because the systems from Default Systems have not completed loading. Given the count of 0 I would assume the server is offline. Even if it were online you wouldn't be able to play until hundreds of random systems had been loaded.

Given this, how do we add more systems? Simple. Map packs.

Return to Community Mods on the main menu and this time search for "map". Select the ones you want and click install for each.



The following are the map packs I have installed

• Alpha2546
  
• AndreasG
  
• eXodus eSports
  
• FFA
  
• Grand Homie
  
• Pwn4two
  
• River
  
• SonicBlue22
  
• TheEffectTheCause
  
• Team Burning
  
• WPMarshall

If you haven't used these map packs before you might want to check out what you just installed. The easiest way to do this is to go into the System Editor from the main menu.



Each map pack consists of one or more categories. For example, eXodus eSporrts has PA League Season 1, eXodus 1v1, eXodus 2v2 and eXodus 3v3+ & FFA. In addition you will see My Systems, which are ones you've created or imported, and Uber, which are the systems that come with the game from Uber Entertainment. Shared should be ignored.

If you want to get an idea of what you've added just browse through the select here and click on a system to get an overview. You'll be able to see number of planets, number of starting locations, planet size, etc. You can always load them in the editor if you want to go in-depth, but this overview should give you an idea of which categories you want to add into your war.

Now everything is loaded all you have to do is pick which ones to use. On the Galactic War screen you'll see that it's not a list of map packs, rather it's a list of the categories you saw in System Editor.



Above I've selected categories optimised to add as many multi-planet systems as possible:

• eXodus eSports 2v2
  
• eXodus eSports 3v3
  
• WPMarshall's Map Pack
  
• Alpha
  
• SonicBlue22
  
• Team Burning Systems

I also deselected Uber. This is done simply as an example to people who want to maximise multi-planet systems rather than as a recommendation on what you should do.

You are free to mix and match the system categories as you wish to get whatever Galactic War experience you want. The important thing is that you should now have a wide variety of exciting systems to play on.