Wrong forum board dude.

You're in the Sins of a Solar Empire forum board. You are browsing it from the Galactic Civilizations site, but all Stardock published games share a single forum database. So you basically posted a thread about Galactic Civilizations on a forum board for the game Sins of a Solar Empire. So this is probably not your intended audience.

So you need to go to the Gal Civ III forum and post there.

The issue is due to how the map generates planets/stars. There is an upper limit of planets per map size that is kinda random in its generation, where you can either get less planets or in some cases tones.

They are addressing it in the 1.4 update which should be out the end of this month.

Paul talks about it in the latest dev stream here:

https://forums.galciv3.com/472081/page/1/#3592865

its about a quarter way in but really the whole things good to watch imo

in the mean time if you dont want to wait you can mod in a higher limit yourself by doing the following-

Find MapSizeDefs in the data/game folder, then change every instance of <MaxHabitablePlanets></MaxHabitablePlanets> to 999999. This should remove the arbitrary cap and you should get more planets.

You have to do it for each map size your going to use, its all clearly listed in the file so should be easy to tell whats what. Also keep in mind that the number is required to be a multiply of some number which i dont have on hand, so if you start a map and the game crashes just try a new number. generally keeping it as an even number helps. You can set it as 999999 but i set it to like 250 from 180 for the huge map for example, which i found was more then enough without going crazy.

That's not the only thing that needs to be changed, though.  StarSystemDefs.xml was ALSO changed and made so the number of planets per system was dramatically reduced.  You can have all the number of stars in the galaxy you want.  Won't matter much if few of them have habitable planets.

Rather than just fiddle around and try to guess nice amounts, I just used the pre-1.03 XMLs and made a quick mod of it.

Yes, that file is a mod. But you can have it as your only mod if you want.  Just throw it in the mod folder, turn on mods, and play the game as normal.  All it does is up the generation of star systems and increases the number of planets per star system.

As for getting rid of Class Zero planets, haven't looked into that.  That would absolutely need a mod if it was even possible.  And it might cause problems since the game turns some Class Zero planets into Thulium and Promethion at map generation and there are a few Mega Events that presume the existence of Class Zero planets.

The game should tell you roughly if not exactly how many habitable planets you can expect on the map you're creating when setting up your game.  I've thought this should be the case since GC2.  It's really the most important thing to know when setting up a game (except perhaps map size) since the more planets the longer the game will last, and yet the game doesn't tell you.  

Stardock just isn't very good at relaying important information to the player.

Luckily habitable planet amounts are easy to mod in the mapsizedefs file.

EDIT just realized this was a necro thread.

I also have grid lines checked in the options, and not the hide grid lines out of influence option, yet after loading a saved game the grid lines outside my influence are almost invisible.  I have to scroll way in to be able to see them.  This seems like a regression from previous versions.

We all thank you for this, I still wish this was built into the game and, who knows maybe eventually they will up their hard cap Even though I don't use mod's it's nice that you created this for others.  Mainly because I enjoy playing games as intended even if I wish they were different...