Does the game feel small to you now?

Sorry accidentally posted this in the main forum....  moved it to founders.

Yeah, I'd like to see things somewhat more spread out as well.

If you want larger galaxies (Brad reduced the sizes), you'll have to change MapSizeDefs.xml and put it into your mods folder.  I'm at work at the moment, or I'd tell you where to find it.  If you just want more room between things, maybe try reducing star frequency to uncommon and play around with the other galaxy settings.

The map sizes have been reduced to the sizes they were in 1.9 instead of what they were in 2.0.  This decreases the sizes for Large through Insane.  Also, the values for Base, which I think is used as the starting point for the calculations of the amount of various things to put into the galaxy, have been increased by 67% to 157% over 2.0 for the map sizes, except Insane.  Insane is 16% smaller in size with the same Base.  Choosing to have settings of Rare or Uncommon should reduce the number of things in the galaxy.

I'm not a fan of having everyone start on top of each other, or of having AIs starting right next to me.  I prefer some exploration and expansion before contact.

I've only tried a few map setups and it seems like the recommended number of races per map is excessive and would lead to unpleasantly (for my tastes) cramped maps.

Well i actually like finding habital planets on abundant. Before your colony ships would not have the range to find planets on insane. Im just talking about habital not good. I was playing the yor, and not even finding extreme. I dont care if they tweak rare settings, but they tweak all of them. To answer op its called uncommon or rare. You would have my support if you were playing rare, but your playing common.

One of the things that really impressed me with early Gal Civ was just how BIG the maps were.   If you had a huge map with tight clusters  you could spend a good portion of the game finding ways to even reach the other areas.

This seems to be gone in the current build.

I also enjoy having abundant habitable planets and that seems to make everything just even more squished together.

I don't want a change to the number of planets  or stars per say...

I just want the super huge maps back...

The problem I'm running into is if I play on one of the larger map types and cut the number of AIs down from whatever the ridiculous suggested number is, such that there's some room to explore and expand without fast contact, then I end up with administrative crisis even with only ever using administrator citizens.  It might be nice if some of these values scaled with how you setup the game, because they're probably balanced around suggested defaults.  Ex, if you reduce the number of AIs on a map, that means more planets for everyone, same as if you up the abundance of habitable.  I guess it's fair as is for both AIs and player but I'm not sure I like it (or need to get used to it).

As a side note going back to pre-Crusade, I wish making map gen settings "rare" actually made them rare.  I like to cut down on the resources since there are way too many and even if you set it to rare they seem pretty common.  Minors are the same way.  I've never tried the highest abundance setting for some of this stuff but it must be pretty crazy.