Yes I agree the habitable or abundant system is broken. I started a map on huge with all abundant and was surprised that the map was maxed out stars right next to each other very little if any gaps and clusters of habitable planets. Then I switched to Gigantic, huge holes, star upon star of class 0 planets and not at all what anyone thinks of abundant.
Yet, this has been a topic of discussion since the alpha and beta process and it is as it is. They don't intend to fill the galaxy up in abundant on larger maps because of issues with the games with more and more habitable planets and computer resources. Plus this also throws off issues w/ game rate and balance issues. Long story short they basically said if you want more you have to mod it as they won't adjust abundant to mean abundant at Galactic Civilizations II rates.
Hopefully this will eventually change but, once again I doubt it as focus is elsewhere and, they see this as not an issue.
I do, however, apologize to Stardock, for being negative or having a negative tone with some of these points as even though I enjoy the game and enjoy playing it, I feel that game has so much more potential if things like this would be ironed out along with several other sore topics in my book which are but, not limited to the following.
- Stability issues - (although mostly stable, the game still has issues with unrecoverable game freezes crashes [single player] and multiplayer crashes and tickets have been completed as recent as the latest version 1.82 and last week, however, no fix ever comes and no timeline ever given.)
- This topic - ctrl + n (was mentioned would attempt to be in but, not for release hopefully shortly after in one of the pre-release dev streams.)
- The second topic here (abundant not meaning abundant) - capping because of game stability/computer related issues.
- Multiplayer love support (Even though the game includes it this continues to sit on the back burner because per Stardock only a small portion of players actually play multiplayer and I feel it's because of the following sub-points.)
- Stability issues - Although less than even 1.6 or 1.7 normally we get a crash or two in a 2-3 hour session. (I have offered to make myself available so they could try to troubleshoot game issues if they aren't seeing it in house but, silence.)
- Length of game - My suggestion to help would be the addition of a turn timer where each player only has a limited time of placing their turn plus the addition of several other suggestions to help this.
- Lack of game features - No Mega Events. (Find a way to balance this out either for a co-op game Human players vs. AI or PVP)
- Inclusion of players that don't have DLC's/Expansions - Let players w/o Mercenaries play those with it. Game type goes to host. What this would do is hopefully allow players w/o the selected expansions/DLC's to get a feel for it and want to purchase it for their single player game. Think of it as in the past w/ partial play demos.
