Posted by: xeryon
« on: April 28, 2014, 09:03:52 AM »i usually take 50 years to get more than 2-3 jumps away from sol.
In my current game I didn't run into aliens until I was 5 jumps away.
Maybe that's my problem with getting blown to bits so easily? I'm 4-5 jumps from Sol about 10-15 years in on most games. Usually I have encountered at least one of the auto-generation races at that distance. Generally I would consider not finding alien neighbors any closer than 4 jumps to be a good thing. It gives you room to grow and expand beyond the early years mineral and financial crises that usually crop up.
I speculate:
One aspect that will have an effect on finding aliens is your starting system. The system generation algorithm seems to group like-age systems. If you start on Sol with real stars you tend to get younger systems with smaller stars and less habitable real estate. If you do a custom start on an older and larger star you might have multiple low colony cost bodies in one system. A lot of your neighboring systems will trend that way as well. Since alien civilizations auto-generate on discovery of systems with the appropriate habitable body it stands to reason you would find a lot more aliens in bigger and older star systems. (I think this is logical as in our universe older systems would have had more time to develop intelligent life or be colonized by intelligent life)