Map making FAQ?

[AMF]

Can someone point me in the direction of a guide, or just tell me, how to best create maps for unique PBW games? I have done it once, but ran into some problems such as placing players in the specific locales (homeworlds) that I wanted them in, and so forth. Very soon I am going to need to make a few more special maps and want to make sure that I avoid the hassles of Last time. Is there a guide? I know that I should create the map using the game, then add to it and edit it using the editor, but apart from that, Ihave a number of other concerns. Off the top of my head these are:

* How can I place players in the right homeworld - especially if the map planet and their atmosphere are different?
* I would like to place players in specific planets. For example, say I would like a specific player to start on a ringworld, but others to start "regularly" - how can I do this?
* In general, how does placing players work? Last time, I set up specific planets as player positions, assuming that the game would make the planets the right size and atmosphere, but IIRC it didn't always work out. Some players had tiny planets. Is there a rule for doing this effectively?
* Do one-way warp points really work? They won't cause the game to crash waaay late in it, will they? Any tricks to making them?
* Does anyone have good rules of thumb for reasonable levels for sector effects such as "sector damage" and so forth?
* When I Last created a map, it had a number of damaging sectors on top of warp points - but when I played with it for real, they only seemed to damage ships most of the time, but not *all* the time. Any ideas why this might be the case?

Thanks,

Alarik