That's surprising.  Am I weird that I like huge maps?

Give us a couple weeks to get used to the game then we'll move up to higher difficulties. At least that's my excuse

The game is four days old.  It's only natural for people to stick to the familiar/small until they get used to the game.

I rather impose restrictions on my own play rather than play against a cheating AI. I also find games in general gets more challenging when I don't exploit AI weaknesses or game the system mechanics even if I can.

GalCiv is no better or worse than any other game in this respect. Although... GalCiv do have some really powerful gamey mechanics to exploit that make the AI very weak as a result.

I also never ever finish games of this nature, they always get boring at some point or the result are already a given... I rather start a new and fresh campaign with new challenges and tactics.

I like to believe I'm not the only person that approach games this way..

Numbers really don't tell the whole story and can be quite deceiving.

I played my first game on Beginner, and it took over 12 hours. I suppose I could have cut half that time off if I didn't try to culture-flip the last two races. That failed miserably, btw. I think culture flipping is mostly useless this time around. I had every planet in the galaxy aside from 4, and every star port pumping out constructors that I used to make influence bases everywhere, I had a favorable-to-me influence thing going on in the UP, and I managed to get one of the enemy planets up to 6x influence. The best I managed to do was get that one planet up to 76% rebellion before my UP resolution ended and everything came crashing down, they all went back to 1.5-2.5x, and rebellion dropped to 0. 

In fact, the only time I flipped anything with culture was the benevolent ideology path's "flip everything in your influence range" thing. I managed to take all 3 minor races, 2 Thalian planets, all of the precursor artifacts, and dozens of star bases in one whack with that. 

I could have also made it shorter by just wiping out the last two races. My military was about 70x stronger than theirs, so it would have been easy. I had been trying to only attack people who had declared war on other, weaker races though. None of the battles I was in were even remotely fair to the other guy.

I guess the lack of reasonable culture flipping means I'm going to have to play far more aggressively if I want to win anything but an influence or research victory.

(I ended up just taking the easy research victory. it only took 6 turns past the time that I was allowed to research those last 3 technologies.)

Also, I played my favorite race from GC2, the Iconians. I'm going to probably try each race in this though.

Influence bases DO extend your influence.  But you're right in that it's not like it was in GalCiv II where you can just come into the middle of someone's territory and plop down a bunch of influence bases.  But they still do generate their own influence.

It'll be more relevant in 6 months.  For a brand new game, people are testing the waters.  I know that whenever I start a brand new game I assume that my first game will be a "throw away" - especially with RPGs, because some chars end up being crap and not fitting into the world.  So the difficulty, playing as Terran, and on small maps all make pretty intuitive sense to me (although "tiny" seems a bit small, I personally go for the middle game size if there's a choice in a new game)...

cheers, glad steam's giving you interesting stats.

I was simultaneously building them around my own planets to buff influence there, and building them near the enemy planets because just building them around my own wasn't cutting it. It did help to build a cloud of them around the enemy, but not enough to actually do a culture flip. (It took the planets from ~2.5 up to ~4-6 to build a swarm of them fully loaded, just outside of the range of their starbase clouds.)

Personally I've probably started hundreds of Tiny/Small maps to test changes in mods, and the larger maps only a handful of times. I imagine people will do the same to check bugs, etc, so that they can report them, or to, say, take a look at the other tech trees, or experiment with how certain ship styles look, or see what's new after an update. Still not fully representative. Tiny / Small is the easiest map size to start - takes the least resources, takes the least time to load and process turns.

I currently play only on gigantic maps and am combating the Godlike AI.  I also don't do ridiculous things like surround a Hyperion Shrinker w six military improvements, because the AI can't pull that off.  It's a player-only thing and thus unbalancing in my own favor.

Sometimes limitations are what makes things more fun.

Dang it! There you go being all logical and using common sense again... Trying to stir up trouble?

I'm sorry, but nowhere have I said that (if it weren't for the reasons I listed) people mostly play on larger maps, or higher difficulties. I certainly do, and what I post is 100% my own opinion, my own take on the stats. Just like everybody else. I love it when people assume that what I state for opinion is what I think is fact.

All I have said is that the results are skewed - which they are - and the reasons why. Even if I were the only one who had started a tiny map to test a mod or report a bug, it would still be skewed, because that would be one false statistic. Here's a hint - I'm not the only one who's done so. Here's another hint - I've also not said that the majority of people do so. That doesn't matter. As the saying goes, "it only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch".

Gotta love people jumping to conclusions. (Which I've probably done several times in this post alone)