Just so you know, SonOfMogh, the galaxy size in the demo is a Small galaxy. If you'd like to see the huge galaxy in action, download the file below, unzip and overwrite the SupremacyCore.dll from the November 17 version of the UI Demo. Note that at the moment, I don't even have enough star names to fully populate a galaxy this size .

Huge Galaxy Patch:

FYI, hitting F12 will reveal the entire map in all of its glory.

Also, the distance between empires is has a minimum value of the side length of the map divided by the number of empires (minor races are not factored in). Setting a low, medium, or far proximity wouldn't really work for multiplayer games, so I'd have to write separate homeworld placement code for single player games. I'd like to avoid that, at least for now.

Good to know that a huge map will be an option! I understand that it wouldn't work in mulitplayer, probably worth revisiting at the end of the process whrn the game is finished. If "minor races" can expand in Supremacy, then I guess you'll always have adversaries and allies of some kind at quite close range.

Woah! That makes the map huuuge!

Obviously having the map that size has an impact on performance - it now takes between 2 and 3 econds for a turn to process on my computer, compared with barely a second on the small map version. The time is irrespective of if a system is selected or not, or even the zoom level on the map - I didn't notice any change in the speed of turn processing in these respects, Mike.

Whilst most people will hate having to wait, I think it is an acceptable pay-off on having huge maps. I severly doubt there's anything you could do to optimise it further anyway, Mike.

Yeah, considering it took like 30 seconds to render a galaxy of the same size back in my first game. A couple seconds is hardly out of the ordinary for a turn-based strategy game. Civ4 lags a bit later in the game, and don't get me started on the original BotF. Gigantic galaxies don't come free.