I've played a few games as Krynn on a Gigantic map with all races enabled plus one custom faction that I made a long time ago.
Tight clusters, common planets, common habitable, common extreme.
Research pacing and game pacing "very slow". "Normal" difficulty.
I generally have been playing as expansionist influence/research turtles (spam out colony ships then make all of the planets generally just produce research and influence).
What I've been finding is that pretty much none of the other races have really gotten anything done by the time I find them (between turn 30-50?). No military, not many colonies, crap research, etc. By turn 100 or so I've explored far enough that I'm obviously super far ahead of everyone I've come across and am generally finding that looking down the tech tree I could just win a research victory in ~50 turns (without even trying to do so up until this point, researching enough diplomacy so that people don't hate me, enough military so that I could scale-up in a hurry if the need arose, and all of the other quality of life stuff).
My sort of macro-plan was just to be influence monsters and flip everyone else - but the game doesn't even last long enough for that to start to happen since I could just research victory so soon (and this is with research set to "very slow"..
Thoughts? How long have everyone else's games been lasting with a Gigantic galaxy with lots of stars/planets and 8 or 9 races?
Any musings would be appreciated,
cheers,