Short game setup?

[ShadowOTE]

I tend towards the opposite end of the spectrum: long, crazy games. My current game is at 25 hours, and I'm just now getting to the AI homeworld (mostly because it took 10-15 hours to clear out the buffer planets and the end of their chains, since they had some good stuff like 2 advanced research stations and a factory, and then secure my chokepoint). Of course, I also tend to play on maps with lots of chokepoints, which cuts both ways. That said, short games are great as well, but I like the strategic planning required for winning on 100+ planet tree or spoke maps.

[x4000]

Personally I'm more your direction, too, ShadowOTE.  I prefer my games in the 13-16 hour range, but I like them comparably long and find 80 planets to be my sweet spot.  There are definitely other players even more extreme than you, pushing north of 60 in game hours in a few cases.  There's a lot of support in AI War for that sort of game, but short of making some lobby settings tweaks it's hard to have a good, shorter, experience.  My posts are to think outside the box and try to come up with a way to make that work, not that I have any interest whatsoever in playing that way myself.

[ShadowOTE]

True, and that's probably about where I'd prefer to play. I'm just trying out a larger map size against some diff 8 AIs. The suggestions so far seem to be a good step in the right direction for short games, although enabling certain minor factions could also help (devourer golem, human resistance fighters) as long as the player is careful. And as always, choosing the right AI type makes a major difference.

[x4000]

Very true.