I wanted to play my first game with the Beta 4B and I didn´t check the blind exploration option.
But when the game started, I couldn´t see the influence circles of the other empires.
Sry if this has been posted bevore.
I played on a huge galaxy, everything abundant with 5 AIs. But after a bit of exploration it turned out
the capital planets of at least one AI was only one sector away. I repeated this 4 times with the same results.
So my suggestion maybe for 1.2 would be to give the player the option to choose the minimum distance of
capital planets so that each empire can expand for a while before meeting another one.