This seems like something that has come up before, but as a new player, I felt I needed to comment.
My coworkers started up a game of this to introduce new people to the game and have some fun. They felt that their experience with the game would give them an advantage if they could see the entire map, so they decided to do a dark galaxy. The only other changes they made were Scanning 2, need to scan someone before trading with them, and Small (16 stars) size.
It’s been a couple of weeks now, and while other people are expanding and enjoying themselves, myself and another player were stuck in our initial six stars, because nothing else was in our scanning range. A few days ago, I finally got my scanning and range up to 3 and 2 so I could leave my starter stars, and that gave me access to two more (terrible) stars. But I was sure that they would lead me to other stars, and I hoped that my hard-to-access position would give me some defensive advantage to make up for my extremely slow start.
Then I woke up this morning to discover that, nope, those two stars are the only ones within my scan range. Meaning that I now have to get up to scanning FOUR and hyperspace THREE in order to have a chance of getting out anywhere.
I’ve read other responses on here that say that this is part of the game, that starts are going to be random, but this borders on the absurd. The fact that it can take weeks and weeks before someone can get out into the greater universe (and actually, you know, play the game) seems like a serious flaw. I was looking forward to playing this game, but this has left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.
I don’t know if it’s feasible to come back from this position, seeing as how all of my infrastructure upgrades are stupidly expensive at this point, and others in this game are getting income and ships from over twice my number of stars (plus probably trading science, which I can’t do because I haven’t met anyone.)
I understand that people aren’t supposed to play dark galaxy their first game, but this amount of isolation seems broken. The variance between starts is supposed to create variety, I know, but it makes the game dramatically less fun to have no options to explore or interact with other people.
Does the algorithm for star placement need to be tweaked? I’m sure that people will say no (as that seems to be the typical response), but a new player seeing this after such a discouraging start is going to lead to people saying, ‘screw this game then’ and leave.
If my coworkers decide to start a new game at some point, what would you suggest the settings be, especially if they still want to do dark galaxy?