So far this is the best update yet. I did not lose a single ship  this time.

Thanks to the dev team. Your guys ROCKED this update!

And since a hexagon = 6 equilateral triangles whose base is one hexagon side, the area of a hexagon must be 6 * (1/2 n^2) = 3n^2.

Edit: The above is correct for geometric hexagons on the plane, but inaccurate for discrete hexes.  Any area will obviously be O(n^2) of any radius-like measure (including the side of a regular polygon).  To derive the exact number of hexes, I'll use the trick that a hexagon's row length increases by +1 hex per row as you scan upward to the middle.  Let m be the base row length - 1 (which seems to be consistent with mapsizedefs).  Consider the hexagon to consist of a lower trapezoid, the middle row, and an upper trapezoid.  We have:

• The base row is m + 1 hexes wide (by assumption).
• The lower trapezoid is m rows (including the base row, but excluding the middle row), and each row width increases by +1 hex, so they go from (m + 1) to (m + m).
• The middle row is 2m + 1 hexes wide.
• The upper trapezoid is identical to the lower trapezoid.

Adding that up, we have area, in hexes, H(m)

• = (2m + 1) + 2 [ SUM{i=1}{m} (m + i) ]
• = (2m + 1) + 2m² + 2 [ SUM{i=1}{m} (i) ]
• = (2m + 1) + 2m² + 2 [ m(m+1)/2 ]
• = 3m² + 3m + 1
• = 3m(m + 1) + 1.

For a pleasing little exercise, we verify this by plugging in small values of m, which we can double-check by sketching and counting.

• m = 0: 3(0)(1) + 1 = 1 hex: The degenerate hexagon with base row = 1 hex is indeed just 1 hexagon!  (This is the DLC I-Win-Now map -- automatic influence victory, no multi-player)
• m = 1: 3(1)(2) + 1 = 7 hexes: 2 + 3 + 2 = 7.
• m = 2: 3(2)(3) + 1 = 19 hexes: 3+4 +5 +4+3 = 2(7) +5 = 19.
• m = 3: 3(3)(4) + 1 = 37 hexes: 4+5+6 +7 +6+5+4 = 2(15) +7 = 37.

So, yay: math works!  Plugging in the mapsizedefs numbers, we get:

•      tiny: 3 (30) (31) + 1 =   2,791 hexes =   1.00 tiny
•     small: 3 (40) (41) + 1 =   4,921 hexes =   1.76 tiny
•    medium: 3 (60) (61) + 1 =  10,981 hexes =   3.93 tiny
•     large: 3 (90) (91) + 1 =  24,571 hexes =   8.80 tiny
•      huge: 3(130)(131) + 1 =  51,091 hexes =  18.31 tiny
•  gigantic: 3(180)(181) + 1 =  97,741 hexes =  35.02 tiny
•   immense: 3(240)(241) + 1 = 173,521 hexes =  62.17 tiny
• excessive: 3(290)(291) + 1 = 253,171 hexes =  90.71 tiny
•    insane: 3(380)(381) + 1 = 434,341 hexes = 155.62 tiny

First one to win 6 insane games wins the set.  A match is best 3 out of 5 sets

I am going to start an 'immense' sized game tonight. Terrans will rule them all. Tight clusters, uncommon habitability, Immense size, all races, all 'gifted', abudundant anomolies, common resources....

Let the war at top tech with Yor+Drengin vrs Terran+Altarians begin! We will sweep them all aside!

Immense! finally a really big map lets see how big is it..

but I have to say the new full screen research window is deal breaker! I'm lost.. it's huge on my 27" monitor so much waste of space with cute robot in center but tottally inefficient...

the previous window was way better

edit: I tried to play the game.. but I can't stand the full sreen research... plus I have to click every time to close the screen that tells me my reseearch is finished..
too bad I was excited to play the new update

I'll wait for next update in hope this will be fixed...

edit: ^ agreed, and I wonder if it's my own research that's crashing me... actually that last one didn't even wait for a turn click so idk, maybe the immense map size.

I keep getting CTDs, didn't get those last patch.  Hope this is just for this specific game save, I don't wanna wait another three months for a playable update

First I would Iike to point out that you can have 130 major races for a star trek mod with whatever map size you want.

Asfar as differences in the game you could have liquid or solid propellant.

Different kinds of fuel.

With computers you could have bio chips, atomic transistors, ferit cores, different silicone chips, engineered computers, and analog.

You could just use electronics instead of usingmicrochips.

There were optional ways automobiles were invented, but gasoline powered was picked.

What if the wheel wasn't invented.

Environmental friendmanufacturing. Not caring about the environment manufacturing. In between these two. Genetically grown factories. Genetically birthed factories. Slavery. Robotic slaves. Intelligent animal slaves. Replicators.

Some races don't use money.

Androids. Brains in androids. Engineered. Cyborgs. Robots tsimulate you while you run them through virtual reality like the movie serrogate.

Propulsion solar sails. Both laser and star powered kind. Stargates, navigators like the arceans, hyperspace with and withoullanes which is basically wormholes, warp drives are where you move folded space like an escalator, really fast real space. 

Governments.

As far as farming and what not.Let's say some races are carnivores and don't have farms. Some races are only vegetarians, or never were omnivores. Some races are omnivores. Some races are omnivores, and never figured out husbandry. Some races are omnivores, and nevered figured out farming. Some races are blood suckers. Some races photosynthesise them selves. 

i couldn't imagine an intelligent society without the wheel 

the wheel & axle is one of the six classical simple machines that society relies upon to do most tasks 

it is way more then just simple transportation 

elevators, pulleys, the potters wheel, most engines/motors, computer fans 

Aztec incan my an. About as equivalent to the Egyptians.

the aztecs had wheels on their toys while not using them for general transportation it is believed by some that they used logs as rollers to build some structures this shows that they used the mechanics of wheels if not using wheels everyday.

and while these are definitely intelligent civiliazations i mean more along the lines of a civiliazation capable of achieving spaceflight

Well the only reason they will never achieve space flight is that they were conquered. The reason I bring them up is isolation. 

Even what you said pointed out that different people did things differently.Is Aztec vs Egyptians.e

I could envision some races (more generally: biomes) that would naturally skip the wheel.  The wheel makes sense wherever you have a need for speed, and flat solid terrain.  Right away, we can violate each word of those requirements:

• Geological life, e.g. smart rocks that think via diffusion of minerals through silicates, or something.
• Smart trees, e.g. Orson Scott Card's piggies in Xenocide.  No movement, no need for a wheel.  They could still become (weirdly) starfaring by pursing a wacky growth stage where they become living rockets, as in one of Niven's short stories.
• Dolphins.  Generally, any liquid-swimmer.
• Birds.  (Kites.)  Any lifeform in a smoke ring [Niven].
• Wookiees from Star Wars live at the treetop level of Kashyyyk, where they are apex predator.  They can't survive at the mid-tree level because they become prey.  The mid-tree hunters can't survive on the ground because they become prey.  (Kashyyyk's fauna are rilly rilly vicious.)  Life amongst tree branches devalues wheeled anything.  (They don't even really need pulleys because there's nothing to lift upward.  Think about it -- they cannot even have an industry based on harvesting resources lower down.)  Somehow, they're still technological.  (Actually, high intelligence is verrrry strongly and ruthlessly selected: the dumb ones get eaten.)

For non-intelligent life, you also need stability of environment for geological time periods, because evolution takes that long to converge to available solutions.  Among Earth creatures, at least one has evolved a wheel-like posture.  There probably were others in the past, but they're either extinct, or we haven't found them yet.

• The golden wheel spider "escapes parasitic pompilid wasps by flipping onto its side and cartwheeling down sand dunes at speeds of up to 44 turns per second."  You can kind of see how this behavior makes sense: it could evolve only in a desert that remained desert for ~100k years, and a spider is already nearly the perfect shape to exploit it.

More whimsically, Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass describes one of the most delightful gentle intelligent races: They look kind of like manta rays, no spine, with 4 legs in a bizarre diamond.  Their world is mostly green vegetation with trees, but riddled with volcano cones and ancient lava flows, which have long since congealed into mazes of flat road ribbons that go basically everywhere.  (Like jump points, they link lava mounds to each other, in a web -- learn the web and you can get anywhere.)  The trees drop huge seeds that are shaped exactly like wheels, with an axial hole in the middle that's perfectly shaped for these creatures to insert their front or rear leg bone spurs.  The seeds have fantastically thick and durable covers, which can be split only by -- grinding them on hardened lava roads for a decade or so (c.f. many Earth plant seeds need time + trauma, e.g. burned once in a seasonal fire, or tumbled in desert for 80 years, or digested-and-pooped, to germinate).  And so -- that's the purpose of these creatures' existence   They help perpetuate the trees by riding their seeds as wheels, until each seedwheel cracks.  Then they all stop and huddle around the rider, give him a spare wheel, and celebrate all the way home because each village matures one seed every five years or so, so it's like their Carnival.  Meanwhile, they get to zoom all over the lava road network.  It's like -- some higher intellect designed both the trees and the riders to co-evolve, or something

I read that book Gilmoy. Good job on reference there. I remember that scene. 

Okay. Modtastic is now a word.

In general, the text in this game is confused and horrid For example, the Terran description at game start of which there is a screenshot attached to this thread is muddled and peppered with incoherent and unnecessary words, a writers fallacy that should be broken off somewhere near the end of high school or the beginning of college if a writer is to develop.

Some of the text in this game is good, but a lot of it is really bad and it breaks the immersion.

Much of the in-game text is a placeholder - the multitude of grammatical errors is pretty noticeable too.

I should also admit that I wouldn't prioritize narrative with a 4X game.  While it can be good, I've also seen too many cringe-inducing attempts at story foisted onto an otherwise tolerable game, to advocate it.  I'd rather just have a small peppering of context and let the narrative build naturally.

The Altarian semblance to humanity is pretty cool, though.