Unfortunately I tried generating a galaxy with 150,000 star spacing just now and the game just crashed. It would be helpful if the 'move' command was always presented like the skip drive command, where it shows the distance and ETA. You would definitely be using the time speed adjustment a lot. Interplanetary travel takes non-trivial time, and strategic management of your interstellar travel is critical so as not to shoot yourself in the foot mismanaging your time. Now everything that goes on inside each system is much more complex and important.

With ABEM you can also turn up the frequency of moons. Now you see why it also makes sense to turn planet frequency, asteroid frequency, system size, etc ALL the way up. So the star spacing should be 150,000 units.

My math is pretty sloppy here, but I'm thinking for a 'realistic' (lol) hard-sci-fi strategy game, let's say we can reach 0.99C pretty quickly and it takes 5 years to slowboat from Sol to Centauri. Stars near the galactic center would be closer together, but I don't think SR2 can do that without a modded map generation code. Sol and Proxima Centauri are about 4.3 LY apart. If you set the star spacing to 50,000 units, it takes 5 minutes for the default scout in the beginning of the game to cross that distance at sublight speed, or about 1.66 years. I like to think of each budget cycle (3 minutes) as a 'year' in game. Sublight travel between stars should take a LONG time, even neighboring stars, even if we generously decide 'sublight' is very close to the speed of light. Hyperdrive is really pretty close to the top speeds you reach at sublight, the difference is you skip the long acceleration and deceleration. In my opinion sublight travel is way too fast. I ignore the warnings that it will kill my computer, and crank up the settings to 1000 stars, 400% system size, lots more planets and asteroids per system, and - this is the important part - turn up the star spacing to 5 digits. Does anyone else think the defaults are way too small? The game setup screen suggests having about 10-20 systems per empire, which seems crazy to me.

Increase interior space star ruler 2