Another thought just occurred to me. Perhaps this question will better convey my quandary. If I want to play a truly epic, long slow game all summer...am I going about it the wrong way? Now, I don't necessarily want 1000 planets resulting in 40 or 50 planets per faction. No, I really want the biggest to have around 20, with 10 being average. I have 26 factions. The problem I'm running into is meeting other factions much too quickly. I'd love to wait till turn 100 or so. That's the feel I want. I'm setting stars to rare, and planets to occasional, etc. in an effort to space things out. Correct me if I'm wrong. By limiting the amount of available systems, I'm actually bringing the possibility of contact up, rather than down, since there are limited systems for the computer to start them on? If my hypothesis is accurate, what star setting, and planet setting will give me sufficient distance from other races, while still keeping total planets around 300?
Not asking for much, lmao. Just a miracle formula. Thanks, as always guys.
Not really an expert on this, as I tend to play Huge maps at the moment, but I'd strongly suggest tight clusters - they tend to be fairly widely spaced out with decent 'rifts' between them, and the game seems to assign homeworlds equally between each cluster. So that'll keep a lot of races a good distance away from you.
However, I'm not sure there's a lot you can do about keeping the races in the same cluster as you very far away.
