Size of map tends to dictate the length of a game by default. Thusly I suggest playing on Large or bigger maps, with 9 ai and your choice of minors, I random the minors but I am thinking of starting with a static number next game I play...Good luck.

Yeah Immense will fill your time up, adn if you are playing on immense the ship ranges wont seem very big. Though your star bases and planets are the ones that determine where your travel range extends from since they are your "refueling" ports so to speak.

thanks again and another question ^^

what are good values for a immense map with 9 ai opponents? I am asking planets, habitable worlds and extreme planets? I am trying to find a good setup to allow for expansion, without having to few or to many colonizable planets without running into the AIs too soon.

In the meantime I'll be checking the modforum

...

Note that the AI difficulty settings will affect that answer.  That is, the higher the AI difficulty settings, the more the AIs can support the Colony Rush economically, the sooner the AIs get faster engines and longer range due to research gains, and the sooner they get to colonize extreme environments.  Also, if one has maga-abilities on or off affects if certain races can colonize certain extreme environment planets from the start.

Thus, indirectly, the speed of research affects the answer, as well.

Hi!

I'm affraid there's no true answer to your question, because it too much depends on how many planetary invasions you still see as fun instead of a grind. In DA the largest all-abundant galaxy I tried was large, and it already felt more grind than fun. You know, taking 5 planets was fun, repeating that 150 times was not fun anymore. 

I can give you only some general info from my DL and DA games:

• AFAIK AIs are optimized for medium galaxy with 5-10 habitable planets per player.  
• The bigger the galaxy, the less efficient AIs play. In my gigantic galaxy with most settings at rare AI never felt like suicidal, more like a maso one with a sub-optimal start.
• For long games take the slowest tech, and turn tech trading off. Belive me, it's not fun when any warship finally arrives to its destination, but is outdated for at least one generaton of weapons and/or defenses. That's valid for your AND for enemy's ships.
• Play games with different settings (or simply click random everything) until you find out what suits you most. When that becomes boring, start role-playing, or set yourself some goal(s) you must achieve (all minors must survive, win with only 5 colonized planets in a large all-abundant galaxy...).
• Games that I remember the most are those that were won against hard or impossible odds.

BR,  Iztok

thanks for all the help makes me feel all cozy and welcome

Once I have more questions I'll be sure to ask them

Metaverse requires you to use the stock settings files.  If you want to play a modded game, don't modify the original files.  Meteverse checks those and will flag the game if it detects any changes.  I believe the whole Metaverse thing is fairly idiot proof now.  The game will tell you right out of the gate if there's a cheat flag thrown.  Older versions didn't do that.  You wouldn't find out the game was flagged until you submitted it.  That caused a lot of problems for people who were getting cheat flags for no apparent reason.

To play a game with customized settings, copy files to the mod directory first before editing them, be sure to leave the original files untouched.  The XML settings files the game uses are basically text files you can modify with any old text editor like Notepad.  Select "use mods" with the appropriate directory in the game setup.  GC2 will happily use any settings files you put in there.  The modded games I've been playing lately have just about all of them changed in some way or another.  It's a really fun thing about the game, the ease and depth of customization.

As far as game setup, I pretty much don't play any of the victory conditions except military.  They're just too easy, except maybe diplomatic.  But, if you haven't played them all, then do, by all means.  An immesnse game with maxed settings yields around 500 habitable planets.  That's going to tax your computer more than your patience.  If your comptuer can handle it, you may find the grind is just too intense.  Personally, I've settled on large and huge galaxies with 4-7 races, but it all really boils down to what you enjoy.

Normally, settings files are located in the program files directory, but it depends on where you told Impulse to install your games.  For Twilight of the Arnor, the default location for settings files would be as follows, if I recall correctly;

C:\Program Files\Stardock\Games\GalCiv2\Twilight\Data\English

User specific files are normally located in;

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\My Games\GC2TwilightArnor

The .raceconfigxml files there can normally be modified without concern, but it's best to delete them prior to starting a Metaverse game.  The game rebuilds those based on settings chosen in the game setup. 

Again, don't modify the original settings files, copy them to a mods directory first.  Of course, if you have no desire to post games, it's not an issue.  Here's where modified settings files would typically go based on the path above;

C:\Program files\Stardock\Games\GalCiv2\Twilight\Mods\<my mods dir>

I believe you can put a mods directory anywhere as long as you tell GC2 where to find it in the game setup.  I don't know for sure though because I always place them in the game's installation path.

I really enjoy casual modding so I'm sure you'll have fun with it.

Enjoy!

Oh gosh, the sky is the limit with this game.  Every file you find in there can be superseded by a modded version.  So, I'd say that 90% of the game is modable.  It's really quite brilliant.  There are some things hard coded into the game engine, but pretty much all of the game structure is specified through those xml files.  The files I would suggest playing with first are RaceConfig.xml, GC2Types.xml, and PlanetImprovements.xml.  There are some really nice editors in the Tools directory to provide a front end GUI for some of them.  Just double click on the .exe file to fire one up.  If you prefer, you can modify files directly with a simple text editor.  The only caveat with that is if you mess up any syntax, the game might hang or crash at some arbitrary point.  That one has got me a few times, but I've always been able to find my errors without too much fuss, usually just some punctuation I missed.