Hi!
| but if you play on gigantic maps with abundant everything its quite worth it to have some 50+ billion people planets |
I see the point. I tried the gigantic map once. Tried, and ran away scared to death.

It was soooo
big. The minimap was pointless. My initial colonizer with best range could cover only an itsy-bitsy tiny portion of it. I closed the game. It was to freaking big to be fun.
I am a MM fan. Most of my Stars! games I've won also with meticulous MM. But there's a limit. In Stars I hit it twice - once as a newbie (where I blamed my lack of experience for turns lasting so long), and about a year ago, when I foolishly joined the 100 year forced gen game in huge uni, and got out of those 100 turns as the second with 110 planets taken. When the real play started, I needed 3-5 hours
for each turn. Fortunately other player got the same problem, and after ~15 turns we quited playing that game. I re-wowed myself never ever again entering a Stars! game with more than 40 planets per player.
In GalCiv I too do quite a lot of MM, so some of my turns also take 10-20 min's, esp. when I'm preparing for a war, and when initial blows fell. However I still miss the convinience of Stars! real players about when the game is practically over. In my recent Stars! game I entered as a replacement at about turn 75, and when at about turn 85 the biggest alliance, that controlied about 35-40% of planets, has shown ships and weapons, for whose my alliance would need about 35 turns to get the tech for, all players quickly came to agreement the game is over. I only wish that could happen in my current GC2 game, where I own about two thirds of all habitable planets, have ships that the rest of players can only scratch the paint from them (large hull,speed 17, 35 missile attack, 16 beam defense, 10 missile defense vs. small/medium with 10-15 beam attack or 5-10 missile attack, and 0-4 defenses). IMO the game is for some time over. Now I need to wipe out the remaining three AIs to confirm that.
BR, Iztok