Gimme' some space dammit!

[Silky Rough]

Space is big right? So why are all my starts having the competition in the very next system where I'm getting choked out far too quickly and being forced to expand all fragmented.... or even to war.

I'm guessing it's my settings (not the game) so what's a good set of galaxy options to get some breathing space so I can expand and turtle for a bit?

Much obliged chaps....

[talemore]

Solo the map and you have the space. If you want opponents start making riots and eventually them will hijack your ships and destroy their own planet. You can play as a pacifist faction and steal every system around you.

There's as well possibility to increase the pirate spawning around your homesystem and play against the pirate faction if you have time for digging through the gamefiles. In this mode you will start in a bad position, even hopeless. You reached the stars to escape the overlords and find a new place to be called home as the pirates taken over your constellation. It turned out not to be pirates, a blockade of ships from an ancient empire against another side and if you have Vaulters dlc you can pick what side to support because you can boost pirate factions so all it takes are minor factions hostile toward pirates. If you on other hand decide to help the rebellion you gain the title as the commander of the ships and ruler of the system in each smaller faction and gain the right to claim back your home.

[HTL9000]

When you start a new game, under the advanced settings for galaxy, there is an "empire spawn" menu that gives you the choice between standard, clustered and chaotic for the placement of major factions in the galaxy. It seems unlikely that you have been fiddling with this and accidentally picked "clustered", but it wouldn't hurt to double-check.

Having said that, I will note that I always play on an exceptional-sized galaxy with the maximum number of opponents, and seldom see a competing race start closer than 5 or 6 systems away. However, on higher levels of difficulty the AI starts with more resources (and more ships, I think) so they may run into you so quickly on their voyages of exploration and colonization that it seems like they are closer than they are.

Something that might help: if you choose a spiral-arm galaxy, unless you are right near the center, you will have fewer early major encounters because everyone will be moving up and down the spiral arms and not crossing the empty space in between. You will still have to deal with one or 2 immediate neighbors and possibly one adventurous explorer as well, so you will have to fight at least one war in order to earn your room to turtle, but that is after all part of the game.

Or I suppose you could start on the largest map, in a spiral galaxy, with balanced empire generation, and have fewer opponents. Then you might run into an explorer ship and have to deal with a colony sent out by an empire with colonizers to burn, but you wouldn't be fighting for a home system right away.

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

Players tend to try and get all up in your s--- since quite early on, but then again in a normal game you should also be reaching the roughly defined "borders" of which systems are in "your space" and "their space" after awhile, at which point you're probably going to start trying to colonize behind each other's lines. I say "space" because realistically you'll usually have like 5 colonies going but still have a massive swath of area you've pretty much staked out either as your own for future development or just don't want anyone colonizing behind strategic choke points at that time.

But that being stated what I tend to do because I HATE the RTS match style of maps in 4x games is to just set a much larger galaxy than however many players there are. If the game says "recommended for 6 players" then select a galaxy size at least recommended for 10 players if not more. There's lots of different options for you to fiddle with until it's vaguely what you want, and making the galaxy more densely populated with stars can help (so there's more systems to colonize) and iirc there's something else that lets stars be spaced farther apart if you want to avoid a lot of border friction. Likewise the constellation density can be fiddled with, and I personally tend to like just setting up everything to be as big and chaotic as possible. When you choose empire placement being chaotic it really is a crapshoot to where you may end up with a small cluster where most players are crowding you, or you can end up with basically no neighbors anywhere near you.

I think that by far the hardest I ever saw a player get shafted by the RNG of any game was when I had a 6 player game set up like that where I ended up in the roughly third of the galaxy where everybody was, and then followed by endless amounts of empty space on the exact other end at the far side of the galaxy was Unfallen and Cravers, alone and completely isolated from the galaxy.

[Red Star, Blood Moon]

Here is what that map looked like by the time I'd already stupidly made an alliance with them and started fighting the Cravers to give the Unfallen some breathing room (I think they had one system left by the time I found them)
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/951839822614785473/A991002D176178C9C109EF56AECE1373980D0728/
So that should give you a pretty good idea what kinds of things can happen if you select disc shaped universe with many constellations and completely chaotic. The southeastern sector was also completely isolated, as well as completely unpopulated except for a minor faction. The southwest was were 4 out of 6 players spawned all competing in that little area. The northeast was the unfallen being left alone in a dark room with the cravers for 100 turns. So yes, it is possible to simply tweak the settings a bit and try and see if you get a roll with nearly complete isolation from the rest of the galaxy, but be forewarned that this is just as likely to stick you in an ovrecrowded nightmare. On the plus side, you'll know if you got a bad roll almost immediately. Otherwise if you still want it balanced just select the largest size galaxy possible so it will take more time for anyone to find you or start competing for systems.

[Astasia]

I play exceptional 5 empires, endless speed. Usually gives me a couple constellations to settle depending on map shape. The problem isn't so much the start locations though, the AI seems intent on spreading out as much as possible and grabbing systems far away from them that they have no hope of holding onto, and then complaining about you being near them. Like Lumeris will forward settle halfway across the galaxy and then yell at you when you make a new colony next to your home system. "You cut off my only access to the rest of the galaxy!" Um, no.

[Biddion]

On game set up note how many competitors you have and then look down at the galaxy options in the lower right corner. All these options will change how close together you start out.

These are the settings I choose:
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/940580973408983340/53894740D4699E906EAD752EBA7EF9A5D2F73CE3/

Galaxy size being the most important for determining if another is starting right on top of you. Consider using your 1st patrol and hero to search curiosities. You can make your hero its own fleet through the hero screen. You need to put exploritory tool on their ship if they are not an explorer by default, which requires dust. If I see 3 paths, I will send the explorers in opposite directions and the colony ship inbetween them, search for my first decent colony.

By searching curiosities and with 3 ships scouting, you can know where the strategic and luxury resources are located and the best positions. Those should be your primary concern, along with the required tech to settle early planet types, when settling systems.

In my current game I have cripped my neigbors in strategic resources and am cultivating 10 bluecap molds and eden essence per turn, which are boosting my science and influence dramatically.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1524413069

Knowing you local neigborhood will often nudge you in which direction you should be heading.