I mildly dislike the idea of an expanding galaxy. I like having clear victory conditions, or ways to end things quickly. I don't want the game to suddenly deprive me of a victory when I was playing a quick game.

However, some times I don't want things to end too soon. Influence victory is the one I most likely not want as it is the one I'm most likely to achieve without trying. It is easy for me to get considerable influence. You can avoid cultural victory by declaring war on a major civ, but I might not want a war at that time.

If anything, I would like to be asked if I still want to play if I meet the conditions of victory. There, maybe you could get your expanding maps, and I could opt out of a cultural victory (so I can go conquest instead, at my own convenience of course).

Expanding galaxies seems like it'd be kind of weird to code, since you have to figure out how to seed the new galaxies such that the races in them start off both with similar tech level (fairly striaghtforward), and also a similar level of development & planetary ownership, while not just mirroring the existing conditions.

Seems like it's better to just use a really big galaxy. You're not going to know what's going on in most of it until later anyway, but it lets the game play out organically.

With the use of 64 bit, they can have a lot more stuff to work with. I'd hope that the "immense" size is a lot bigger as a result.

Just remember "In space no one can hear you scream"

Map sizes larger than Immense? I just checked GC1 and GC2 and the largest map size went up one size between the Ultimate versions of each, from Gigantic to Immense. With the change to hex tiles in the map, I am wondering how sizes will compare with GC3. Are we talking about apples and Oranges here?

Another question: With the size names already up to "Immense", and "Gigantic" already in use, would SD like some recommendations for how to name larger map sizes? The names for the larger maps already have the sense of grandiosity, so maybe for GC3 StarDock needs to re-think about size names, perhaps using more names in the middle range to make room for larger sizes.

I just checked the map sizes in GC1 Ultimate and GC2 Ultimate, and sizes of the same name are not the same size. Here is the  chart I made:

Size                              GC1 (all sectors are 12x12 tiles)        GC2 (all sectors are 15x15 tiles)

                                    Sectors        tiles                             Sectors             tiles

Tiny                              4x4             48x48                          3x3                  45x45

Small                            5x5             60x60                          4x4                  60x60

Medium                         8x8             96x96                          5x5                  75x75

Large                           10x10         120x120                        8x8                 120x120

Huge                            16x16         192x192                      12x12               180x180

Gigantic                        27x27         324x324                       18x18              270x270

Immense                       N/A                                               22x22              330x320

I am guessing, but wasn't "Immense" only available after "Dread Lords"?

Except that mormegil disclaimed knowing, even though he is an SD employee. So maybe they are keeping it a secret so they can surprise us.

Except for the previous post from that SD employee stated hex sectors are 12 tiles on each side which would mean approx 372 tiles not 167.

He actually said in reply #36, that sectors currently use 12 tiles on a side, and that the smallest map uses 7 sectors. No theoretical there. Only facts (with the disclaimer, that it might change, of course).

Just did some quick math while waiting for the bus 

@9 to a side there would be ~ 210 tiles slightly smaller then gc2

@ 10 to a side there would be ~ 260 tiles a little bit bigger than gc2

@ 12 to a side there should be ~ 374 tiles about 150 tiles more then gc2 or a 2/3 increase

perhaps you guys should think outside the box, for example maybe black holes and white holes could be one way portals for multiple universes in one game. Maybe multiplayer will allow somebody to link their single player game map with another map in someone else non modded universe.

Then again, this has been tried and only works with smaller scale maps.

I would hope we would still have the smaller map options, so people who want smaller maps can have that option. Why not make the largest map to take full use of your memory for the largest map. U don't have to play the biggest maps. Now here is my idea for a shorter game give u turn limits and score u on points. This can still apply to victory conditions or it could just be a war game for the short game. I'm guessing the size of the new map is going to be something like 10000 planets, stars, wormholes, astroids, resources, and anomolies; because, the new engine will be able to support this the same way the old engine could. There will still be different sizes of maps. I say bigger the better map. A bigger map should have more species. I don't understand the argument u can always pick a smaller map right. As long as this don't affect graphics. Is graphics the argument.

Expanding galaxies? (not universe, since the game is played on only one galaxy.) I don't know. I think if it were to be considered it would have to match the expansion rate of the Milky Way. Since WikiPedia doesn't mention anything about our galaxy expanding (it only gives an approximate size of 100–120 kly) then perhaps any expansion is only observable over periods of thousands of years. Since a game spans only from 1 up to 30+ years, I think the idea of having an expanding galaxy in the game would be too far from reality to be acceptable by players,

I think this is not a reasonable idea for this game because it would stress the credulity of many players, since the period of game time would be much to short to have an observable expansion of a real galaxy.