It's still being balanced.  In fact, they're in the process of data driving it.

For this opt-in one,  we wanted to see the general effect of lowering it some.  

Bear in mind, insane maps are still insane (They're just as big) and there's still lots of stars. But instead of 6400 planets there might "only" be a couple thousand instead.

Answer: yes. But I'm not sure which xaml it is. Even the star count is in there.

-doubled posted somehow instead of editing-

I am playing an immense map with loose clusters, occasional stars. common planets and occasional habitable. I am not having a problem with habitable planets. At about 100 turns I have about 20 colonies. I expect I will wind up with about 30 and that is okay for occasional habitable

The problem I have is there are almost no relics. I have them on abundant, which was admittedly too many in 1.01 but they are extremely rare on this map. I have explored about 20% of the map and I have only found about 6 relics. That is too damn few. There are fewer resources but no where near as scarce as the relics.

This needs another look. 

Looking further, I pulled up a small map with everything on abundant. There seemed to be enough planets to suit me but probably not others who want to have a large number of colonies. I didn't count the planets but I would estimate there were well over 100 habitable planets on the small map

I counted a total of 10 relics on the entire map not counting ascension crystals. That is not enough if they are going to be part of the game. On abundant there should be at least 30-40 relics on a small map 

Nerfing this, is not the answer I already thought abundant was too low when ruffly half the stars had habitable planets of any sort extreme or normal.  Now you cut the stars back as well.  This is going the wrong direction.  The star/habitable planet density was already lower than Galactic Civilization II and, this is a let down.

I still have faith in the game and as you said it's still being balanced please continue to work on this to allow the same density Galactic Civilizations II had in abundant settings, and if rare still isn't rare have that reflect little for those that want it.  As always I appreciate everything your team does. 

Yea I play pretty much the same settings as Franco and the amount of stars on abundant is a bit thin. Reviews or not, seems you cannot make everyone happy. I think we will find a happy medium on settings soon. 

What would prevent SD from giving the player control of exactly how many stars and habitable planets there are on a map, randomly distributed, through a setting in game setup?  I've never really liked the probability settings anyway because there's no explanation of exactly what "abundant" means.  Sometimes I start and restart games to get the frequency and distance settings I want.  So is there a code-related reason we can't say "I want an insane-sized world with 300 stars, 150 habitable planets, and specific amounts of startegic resources"?

Which systems were this? I am running it on FX-8350 with SSD and 32GB DDR3 and it becomes unresponsive during turns, and doesn't appear to use a constant amount of cpu power during the game, very heavy during initial setup and then barely at all until you hit turn where it jams the cpu and then after it is done with its 5-10 seconds of processing is responsive again. Please don't tell me it is because AMD IPC because I am clocking around the same levels an i5 gets only with 8 cpu cores which the i5 doesn't have.

This seems like a user issue, not a game issue.

If someone has a toaster for a computer, they should reign their settings in. I don't have a toaster, even 300 turns into a game on abundant immense or larger galaxy settings with hundreds of planets colonized turns took maybe a max of 10 seconds which is well within acceptable turn time for me.

LoL I was just posting this and the forums ate it when I hit "Post".

Map generation on immense maps for stars and planet spacing seems different on 1.02. Not sure what (if anything) was changed in the generation code or maybe I just had a real bad string of mutations for star and planet spacing.

It seems that the "scattered" spacing is acting more like loose clusters.

Test Settings:

Stars: abundant
Planets: abundant
Hab Planets: abundant
Extreme Planets: common
Black Holes: rare (as they take up space and cause pockets of no planets)
Nebulae: occasional
Asteroid: occasional
Resources: common

15 enemies, and sometimes even on Immense maps they get bad starts and are far closer than they should be with that much space.

When starting a game that big going in knowing it will be a huge investment of time you want to make sure you aren't being gimped by a "horrible" starting position right from the beginning. Before I start a game of this size I always set my settings, then do a "quick-start" and "fowtrans" before I do anything else just to make sure I'm not starting a "unwinnable" campaign because of huge blank spaces around me with absolutely no place to get one or two (even bad) colonies started. I don't "cheat" to the point of restarting and restarting until I have the perfect setup of good planets and no enemies around me, but I do check to make sure I'm not stranded either.

With those same settings as above on 1.01 for every 10 or so generations I would get a map that was ok as far as star and planet spread on Scattered even with a few black holes in the mix on rare. Some of those maps would still have some spots where there was nothing close by at the start of the game significantly putting you at a disadvantage at the start of the game making them a more or less losing situation from the start. For the most part 1.01 was doing a decent job at scattering the planets though.

1.02 on the other hand seems to be doing something different with generation and I'm not sure but even the sizes seem smaller on immense and upward. I started a new game last night after the patch with the above settings trying to get a decent starting location to what I would consider a "decent chance". It took me around 20 or 30 generations to get something that I thought was even passable as far as "scattered" stars and planets go. It seemed to be acting more like one of the cluster choices.

I ran some further generation tests changing up some variables even taking out black holes completely and is still wasn't scattering the stars and planets well. There were pretty big gaps in a lot of (most it seemed) maps, either where your starting location was too far from the nearest star or what stars might be close had no world or maybe a few dead ones. The biggest problem it seems to be is having large gaps in what should be more or less (but still with some randomness) a evenly distributed scattered map. I can completely see having some gaps in any scattered random map and it adds some strategy to what would otherwise be a checker board layout and that's needed even on scattered. The gaps just seemed far too big and too many though.

Also did the actual hex numbers on sizes change or did it just feel like that to me? Maybe it was the changes in the generation system? Or is it possible I just had what I'd consider a really bad run of random generation? Which is easily possible too.

Thanks for any input on this.

Are you playing on Insane? If you're only getting a 10 second pause while its processing between turns, I'm not real sure what else you expect? If you're playing on Gigantic or lower, then yeah.. there's something going on there that needs to be addressed.

I have i7, 16GB system and I have an Insane map size game I'm playing with about 70 factions. Turn time is about 30 seconds. Completely acceptable to me for such a large map and so many AI.

OK, I decided to do some empirical testing just now.  Patched to 1.02., started an Insane Map with everything cranked to Abundant (except for Extreme Worlds which was set to Rare).  Opened up the console and hit Colonize All.

This is what I got:

Errr.....

That's...  WAY to small for me. Literally by an order of magnitude.  

For comparison, I was getting 1500 more or less when I did the same thing on an I/A/A/A map previously.

In case the fact that I chose Loose Clusters has anything to do with it, I went ahead and did the same thing, this time with Scattered (which should give the largest amount of room for star placement).

Got the exact same number: 208.

Now I know that this can be modded (in a couple of different places, actually).  And I know this is for getting feedback.  And I even know that through various ideological traits, a few more planets appear, thus depending on what those other factions do and the number of them, the 208 number will go up.  And, of course, that 208 number doesn't include the 7 other factions I have on the map.

Still.  This is a lot smaller than I even imagined last night.  As I said previously, on Immense Maps in GC II with everything cranked up, I would usually see a final planet count at around 550 or so.  Which was perfectly manageable if one did things in bite sized chunks.  Maybe the base game should have less planets on an Insane Map.  Personally, I disagree, but I can see the arguments when it comes to expectation settings and performance on people's home rigs.  On the other hand, Insane should be, well, Insane.  And I don't think it should be about 40% of Immense of GC II.

So not a fan at all I'm afraid.  Both for personal and structural reasons.

Besides, it almost makes the much mooted 100 player faction games unplayable.  Literally on smaller maps.

EDIT::::

In case the number of asteroids, relics, and everything else on the map made any difference, I made another check after setting all asteroids, nebulae, black holes, pirates, anomalies, and relics to none.  Got the exact same number of planets before.

BTW, I do hope this (and my prior) post(s) don't come out as sounding overly cranky or entitled.  I admit I am a little personally miffed, but I am trying to keep the feedback as even-keeled as possible.  Mostly because I like my crititcism to be constructive.  But also partially because I think I have a greater chance of being listened to if I am reasonable.

Well, reasonable-ish.