I bought this game yesteday and played a small map last night to figure it out.
Today I started a huge map, with 100+ planets and 3 AI races.
Scouting around the planets in my immediate vicinity every world had at least 2 and as many as 6 or 8 ships around it. So I'm forced to immediately pursue a heavy military build-up just to get an initial footprint going. I guess I had assumed that with 4 total races spread among 100 planets that I would not even come across anyone else for an hour.
Are there ever an unexploited planets?
I also can't figure out how the AI could have spread out so far in minutes. Does every planet automatically populate with AI ships when you start a random game?
The forced inital rush for military build-up is a little too RTS and not as much 4X as I expected from the reviews. Did I just get a weird random map?