Oh, I press the 30 day button regularly, but it almost never seems to go through beyond the very early game.
well a way you can get around that is by actually not creating NPR's at start as well,
Obviously you know this, But to make the game still challenging start the game
with high population i start with 5 billion then go into SM mode and remove the population down to 500 million or something, or just start with higher pop and drop your population down to your normal amount.
Then randomely generated NPR's you get will find will be very large when you discover them, bringing on the feel of walking into a real NPR that sat for 100 years building up fleets and such.
eta because i didnt finish what i meant to write..... i fail.