No useful planets in sight

[Red Spot]

Honostly, smallers maps are more difficult. On larger maps you can always go somewhere and taking a few more planets can be quite effective when finding some good bottleneck position. On smaller maps you are quickly breathing on some coreplanet, which in turn feels a need to breath back a bit .. with mk4 coffing & sneezing.

Also the FS-campaign gives you a lot more room to let it trigger the recoveries in a way they actually work in your favour. Doing it on smaller maps means you will be recovering later shards through/from core/home-planets.
And dont forget about the FS-fleet itself, without that the actual taking of the planets would be a serious grind(read: boring), defending would again be twice as interesting, but fail once and you likelly fail the game (its fairly difficult to stop 7k mk4 ships if you just wasted your own fleet ).

Some things you just gotta do once in this game though .. pretty much anything, at least once

[zoutzakje]

haha yeah, I like trying out new things in this game (so many possiblities). But yeah, I see that playing on a big map could be easier than on a small map. I'm used to neutering things and when playing with 100 planets it's impossible to neuter much at all before ships start piling up again... but if you capture everything eventually anyways it doesn't matter. it will in fact only give you a lot of resources and eventually enable you to even cap mercenary ships if you'd want to.
I haven't been using the FS stuff yet though. For some reason I can't get used to the whole mining thing or the campaign. I'll get more into it once I'm positive I can handle myself with every AI type on at least dif 7. Already managed to beat a tech raider on 7 and another on 7.3 at the same time (instead of one lvl 7 and one lvl 1, like I was doing before) so I think I'm doing great