How many stars in your galaxy?

[Shards]

Hi,

We're often wondering how you all play our game so I thought I'd do a straw poll!

How many stars do you play with in your games?

The game is generally tuned to operate best at the default of ~360 but can go much higher and lower than that. It'd be interesting to know how you're all playing?

Thanks!

[ChavaiotH]

600 stars.

[Thorin]

90, more stars add nothing to this type of game, but sadly almost every one of them wants more.

[Mansen]

My current game is just default settings - But I'll definitely want to experiment with some more 3D esque maps with lots of stars (hopefully lots of them without any planets at all)

[Sorden]

3 player, 120 stars as my starter game to get the feel of it.

[[SOT]Plasson]

800-900? whatever was the max on the 2 armed galaxy map

[Astasia]

800-900, max races. With the rarity of good planets it doesn't feel like enough. In a game so light on colony interaction it feels like things are designed around having many dozens if not over 100 planets in our control, but the expansion phase ends early with each side having like 10-20 colonies, and 90% of the stars are empty.

I like my games as long as possible, so more is always better as long as the engine and my PC can handle it.

[Sesikee]

800 to 900 stars.

I just love long games and like to feel like I'm building an empire then start getting ready to defend my borders.

[Ufnv]

Please note that having huge galaxies significantly increases the distances between earthlike planets!

Playing 300 stars and 900 stars are two very different types of experience...

[Mansen]

Tiny interjection here - Does the kind of star affect what planets are likely to be present? Some 4X games do this, while others choose not to for flavour.

[Shards]

Yep, if you click on an unexplored star system it'll tell you what you're likely to find

[Mansen]

Yeah I noticed that - But some games just have that for flavour. Not all of them actually follow through with it in galaxy generation code.

Cheers. :)

[Ufnv]

this can be tuned further tuned via plantype.ini file

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Ufnv:

Please note that having huge galaxies significantly increases the distances between earthlike planets!

Playing 300 stars and 900 stars are two very different types of experience...

Actually it sounds like it doesn't make much difference at all, it just creates bigger gaps in your territory full of useless stars. I play with more stars in these games because I want a larger game, more colonies, more resources, longer exploration and expansion phases. It doesn't make sense to scale the quality of planets down as the number of stars increases, that basically cancels out any difference.

Why not make planet quality a slider so I can play a map with 900 stars and a lot of earthlike/ocean/desert planets, instead of a galaxy full of 90% barren dwarfs, giants, and planetoids.

[mikeCK]

How about more stars BUT, less with colonizable (or any) planets at all. Earth like planets should be less common (so far as we know I guess)

[TCPippin]

Originally posted by Shards:

The game is generally tuned to operate best at the default of ~360 but can go much higher and lower than that.

I'm playing a campaign with default settings, so it's 360. I have to say, it's exhausting - I only control about 30% of the map (140 colonies, but some systems have two), but I litreally steamroll any opposition: 6 other races have about 40 colonies each (cats are all but dead and I've wiped out birds already), so they're hopelessly behind in terms of science and production. But the amount of clicking required to wipe them all out makes it likely I'll start anew on hard (instead of current medium) and in smaller galaxy.

If I may make a suggestion: currently I have to click alot to recolonize territories I've conquered and sterilized with planet-bombers. My industry planets churn out colonizers, but they never join existing fleets, so to better manage them I have to move mouse over "fleet" of single colonizer, click "merge" button, then click the fleet with all the other colonizers. Rinse and repeat dozens of times.

So, the suggestion is: could you add a hotkey for "fleet merge" button?
Another UI improvement that would be helpful is a button to unload every fighter from every carrier in current fleet - when I expand my borders, I use my carriers to deliver some fighters to protect new worlds, and having to manually open each carrier's "contents" and drag'n'drop fighters is very time-consuming.