I am a relative newbie. Just won my first tech victory at masochist level on large playing korath. I was about to start up another game when I had this sense of lethargy at the thought that I have to again go through this colony rush business.

So here is a suggestion for developers. Can we have a game option which provides a completely different starting point where all the civs have already populated most of the worlds?

If someone starts with say 5 civs then each one civ occupies about 18% of planets (actually tiles maybe better), plus minus 2%. The remaining 10% is unoccuppied. [After all these are galactic civs and are surely not restricted to one planet ]. Each planet occuppied may have pop of 0.1B barring home planet which remains 8B. Everything else remains the same.

This now means that the mad colony rush business is not so important. The remaining 10% planets will mean some element of rush. But now the focus can shift to building on ones strengths and exploiting others weaknesses in a more strategic and meaningful way.

I think this will make each game far more varied and interesting tactically.

I would love to hear what all the game gurus and experts have to say about this. I would also love to know what the developers have to say about this.

[have to go - starting up as torian on suicidal ]