Am I really playing in a medium universe?

You DO NOT get 700 habitable planets (or even planets) on a meidum map. For that, you need to play on a gigantic size galaxy with everything set to abundant. Seriously ask yourself - are you ready for that kind of time and effort commitment?

Your map size is medium because it has 5X5 grid.

It was no camplaint nor do I want to play with 700 planets It is just that my neighbours seem so close and I am usually more of a tactical player who likes to turtle in the beginning, to bring up research and infrastructure before risking any conflicts. I thought it would take a while on medium maps before you meet other civilizations.

Sorry if my tone sounded a bit aggressive - I didn't mean it that way but anything is possible over the net. Cheers!

2 AIs at medium should give you enough time to expand IMO. At least you should have enough time to get a sizable empire going before a war starts. Or you could play on a large galaxy. Sizes are as follows:

Med - 5X5 = 25

Large - 8X8 = 64

Huge - 12X12 = 144

Gigantic - 18X18 = 324 sectors

The jumps are quite big. Immense has 21X21=441 sectors but I don't there is much difference as far as the number of planets etc is considered, AFAIK. Maybe you should try large with 3-4 AIs?

You actually get around 500 habitable planets with a gigantic/abundant map.  In Twilight, the larger immense map produces the same number of planets as the gigantic map.  Older versions of Dark Avatar could yield higher numbers. There was an early release of Dark Avatar where the numbers could approach 1000.  This was reduced in subsequent updates due to memory limitations and game crashes.  Although there were lots of objections posted here when the numbers were reduced, it had to be done.  The numbers should have never been that high to begin with.  Even with 500 habitable planets, the game can heavily load the fastest computer.  I've played a few games with that many habitables and it's very long and tedious. 

The jumps in map size are rather large and non-linear.  It would have been nice to be able to specify the size in single steps, but I'm sure that would have been a coding issue.  I often find myself wishing there was a size between large and huge.

I can understand - something like 100 sectors would have been nice. And something between Huge and gigantic too, maybe?

I recently finished a huge/abundant game, there were 350 habitable planets.  That's still too many.  Took me way too long to go through them.  One of the problems I find with playing a lot of planets, the user interface is not optimized at all for that kind of repetetive thing.  I get really tired of clicking on tiles and projects.  Maybe I'll try a huge map with less stars/planets next time.  Right now I'm playing a large/abundant game.  That yields around 200 habitable planets. I think that's about my limit for what I like.  Although, I could probably use a size between huge and gigantic if I reduced the planets numbers quite a bit.

Hehe, I have my hands full at Medium abundant itself!

If you play with tight clusters, and few players, it often lets your empire be a little more seperate, from what I've seen at least. I love the slow long games though, so I usually just use the biggest and most I can get on scattered. Just remember star system scatter vs cluster makes big differances in game style too, try some combos out, and find what you like! : > Hope this helps

Scorpion