What are the most realistic settings to play?

I know someone made a galaxy that was intended to depict the actual stars within the near vicinity of Earth, but I'm unsure if it's in the library or hidden somewhere in the forums.  That would probably be the best bet.  If I can find it I'll either edit or post again and link it but I make no guarantees.

Aside from that, it would either be a medium or possibly a large map.  Asteroid frequency doesn't change much regardless of how much you change the slider and they -should- be relatively common, but you're free to turn that down a tad as well.

The extreme planet setting in TA is something that requires a good deal more thought-we simply don't know how many planets may be out there that we can't yet colonize.  However, whatever the second or third option is (higher, that is) should work fairly realistically-not every world is going to be a class 10 Terran (borrowing nomenclature from Sins) planet.

So that'd be one below frequent, I think.

Planets themselves aren't terribly uncommon.  Habitable planets, even counting the extreme environments, should be a smaller subset of that, so one setting down from whatever you pick there.

Since it looks at present as though there were no previous civs running around in space, the anomalies would be at a minimum; wormholes aside, that is.  I've not found the anomaly slider to make that much difference, though, particularly as from DA 1.8 onwards they regenerate during the course of the game (which was done if I understand correctly to make survey ships more useful, and has little or nothing to do with the lore).

Stars, on the other hand, are incredibly common.  Probably abundant.

Odd ball figure; we have yet to find more than three star systems with some "unhabitable planets" within a 3d spherical (not flat as a GC2 map & interface representation) radius of about 50 LYs.

Here's one; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581

...and this, for a bit more technicalities about such estimations; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_with_confirmed_extrasolar_planets

So that tells you.

Proportions or speculative parsecs/sectors "compression" aside, you'd certainly need about 250+ Immense maps patched together (in all z'y'x' axes, btw) to reach a single one of those systems!

More so... The Solar system (8+Pluto special case+Belt) is estimated to most probably be the unique representative of such kind in around 1/3 of our galaxy (and further more due to the very slim ringlike (think of a torus shape) region where Time scale & specific star types could indeed have a single Planet). We can't even be sure those two other fews have a Earth type in the precious it.

SETI might find something, but it's a looooooooooooong shot to say the least.

Now, try to pack a full deck of 9 AI opponents in any given map sizes and what you're really looking at, in fact, is Saturn & its moons in all their glory - relatively speaking.

Zyx, I wasn't trying to get the distance at all correct.

I know SoleSoul, but visit the link i just inserted... for a good sense of reality.

I think the stepping stone for true FTL "exploration" of the neighborhood would in fact be Gliese-581c or d as these are just 20LYs away and are the only ones with Rocky surfaces for Landing. Beyond that, it's 50+ and even directional distances are a clear obstacle to pit-stop traveling & if not, the rarety factor itself.

Hi Nels.

You seem to have a pretty good handle on the game vs reality thing, so I'll skip this. Here are the choices that I generally make when trying to make a 'realistic' game. 

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglinly big it is." (DA) Start with an immense galaxy. This doesn't even remotely approximate reality, but it is what we have to start with.

There are a lot of stars. We know this. I set stars at 'abundant'.

The aforementioned stars occur in no real pattern. Some are in globuar clusters, others are widely scattered. I usually choose random. Clusters, more often than not, mean early wars, scattered generally gives more time to advance. 

We have no idea how many planets there are in our galaxy. We've found over 300, but all of these are gas giants. (Like Jupiter or Saturn). This is a tiny fraction of a percentage compared to the number of stars, but there is a lot of leftover crap in the galaxy, and our own system has a 9:1 ratio, so I usually set planets to 'common'.

Habitable planets are rarer than rare. (If they even exist outside planet Earth)

Asteroids are common. We know of many thousands of them in our own system.

Define 'anomaly', and set the game accordingly.

These are the only settings that have even the most tenuous thread to reality. Set the rest as you see fit; your opinion is as valid as mine.

Above all, remember that this is a game, not a simulation. It is meant to be fun.

Best of luck to you, and if you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Thanks for the comments everyone.  It's just what I was looking for.

Sorry Mistralok, but i have to correct this figure...

If one parsec = 3.26LYs, Gliese581c (Habitable Zone!) is only about 6.22 GC2_grid squares away from Homeworld_Earth!

Go out up to the (TA) Immense edges and you'll get about 20 more planets most or near all of which are PQ0!

Some of these systems have more than 2 planets and all the abundant Stars that remain are empty.

40-Eridani (Star Trek Vulcan) is the only other half-proved "real" probability of a Gliese/Type and it's 16LYs from here.

What we'd really need is Hubble telescope-S 10 times as powerful to detect and prove anything else outside a rather small 250LYs 3d/Spherical/Radius. 77 worth of GC2 parsecs & 5 Sectors of a Medium map, btw.

Here is a link to a catalogue of nearby exoplanets. There are 228 listed there. It is a bit out of date (January 2008), and many more have been discovered since.

http://exoplanets.org/planets.shtml

Yep, but some of these are 1000LYS away and beyond!

Out of the Wikipedia 76(proved)+251(candidates) listings linked above the distances registered go as high 20,000LYs away!

We do have an extremely rare neighborhood, not that we can actually detect everything 360° full circle.

It's the dawn of space Exploration, barely.

Don't make the mistake of using our current level of discoveries as a limitor of what may be out there. Our current planet hunting techniques are very primative. Not only could there be many smaller planets around stars where we have located gas giants, but there could be many systems we've looked at and detected nothing yet, though there are planets there.

The Kepler planet hunting telescope was only recently launched. It will monitor 100,000 stars over a period of 3.5 years in the hunt for extra-solar planets and should be sensitive enough to detect earth sized planets in the habitable zone of a distant star. Even then, Kepler is not advanced enough to detect planets in every case where they are present. In any event, it seems extremely likely that we will discover thousands of planets using Kepler. This will help give us a low end estimate for the number of planets out there, but it can not give us a comprehensive survey of every solar system it observes. It will likely miss many planets, with the likelyhood of missing one increasing as the size of the planet decreases.

We can not rule out many undiscovered planets around even our closest 100 neighbors given our current technology.

A few years ago I saw a road map of potential future planet hunting technologies that streched to 2050, with the capabilities increasing significantly every five to ten years. We have just barely scratched the surface at this point.

I found this site to be very helpfull with information about the stars nearest to our own sun and the potential for habitable planets orbiting them. There is also a cool 3D starmap application available here.  http://www.solstation.com/stars.htm .

-Thielfin

Yep, SolStation is a great solid source for truth and facts, they even link straight to an old but exceptional java applet; chView2.jar.

Aside from huge costly astronomy simulators or freewares, it's the next best thing to obtain a rather simplistic perspective over 250LYs worth of neighbors all in a 3D freeform.

Axiom, soooo true... the Kepler project is to clear planets discovery within short distance what the Hubble red-shift hunter is for a quest of some Universe depth far enough to be unreachable - Inter-Galactic speeds probable or not.

A mission of 100,000 observation is peanuts, though. Next time you look up to find the Taurus constellation (Pleiades, anyone!) or even the Crux, you'll just see how wide 400,000+ stars can fill in the night sky.

I would have wanted a more realistic Galactic Civilizations. If you play Civilization 4, the game is filled with history. The game and the Civilopedia is one long history lesson. But GalCiv 2 feels like a Civ-game in space. Where is the astronomy? The wonder of space? The concept of huge distances? The game should be filled with realistic astronomy and physical constraints. Fun, realistic and educative...

Have a look at this...

http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

...you can get a lot information out of it, it´s basically a Universe browser. Also refer to this links...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_stars

I´m creating a Milky Way based map for TA at the moment. Maybe it´s of use ?

Not much history in Civ 4 to be honest.

Anyways, I feel Gal Civ 2 is a bit souless. Unlike Alpha Centuri which had a fantastic, bleek atompshere feeling to the game. The little details is what made it great. The overall story, quotes for each race, the wonder movies, the united nations feature (which absolutely superior to Gal Civ2s).

Basically MOO2 + Alpha Centuri would be the best game ever created.

Basically MOO2 + Alpha Centuri would be the best game ever created.

          Amen, Sisonpyh !  Just what I was thinking; and I couldn't agree more !