For my first game, I chose to create 1 NPR, 30% generation of NPR, 400 systems and the other alien options except for invaders turned on, using "Real Stars" mode. This was more or less my tutorial game of figuring everything out - Now 70 years later I feel significantly more comfortable with the game. My only issue is. . . Over 70 years of games, I've been in 3 "battles". The first was against a total of 7 ships, the second against 3 ships, and the third against 2 ships. I used the game details option to change the NPR generation to 100, turned off real stars and lowered systems to 100, hoping I could generate an enemy. I explored another 16 systems, but still no NPRs found. Now I'm running into turn increments lowering to 1 to 3 day max before an interrupt (I looked at the SM log and it appears to be one race continually detecting and losing contact with another NPR's thermal signature. Over and over, the same ships, detecting un-detecting endlessly for a full year of game-time at 1 to 3 day increments before I gave up.
So, I feel like this game is slowly crashing because I can't find these two NPRs to engage them myself and stop this slowdown. So I'm thinking of starting a new game (this time with more knowledge about what to do from the start). If I was looking for a much more battle-heavy game, what sorts of settings should I do? I heard "real stars" has a lower chance of generating valid NPR races, so I figure that will be disabled. Would I encounter many worthy adversary NPR races if I set it to 100% generation chance with a smaller amount of systems (50), and disabled a starting NPR?
Any suggestions on having a much more action-packed universe, while hoping to avoid frequent NPR vs NPR slowdowns would be awesome.
