Just giving feedback on my experience playing the insane map size. First off, I can't play it anymore because every time I try and load that game, it crashes shortly after the load screen gives way to the map. The game seems to have a difficult time processing everything on the map. I was preparing for war, my ships lining up at their borders, preparing for the slaughter to come, but as I built up ships, it became harder and harder for the game to stabilize. I want to play this game so so badly. Please keep up the good work with the stability updates because I'm just a large map kind of guy. I don't even know if I can go back to gal civ 2 after experiencing the wonder of such a large map. But as it stands, my empire is locked in a prison made of game crashes. LET MY PEOPLE GO I SAY! I've got trillions of people counting on me here.
On a side note, here are my rig's stats so you can get a better idea of what level of computer rigs are having these problems. Maybe SSD makes it way better, I have no clue.
GPU: GTX 560 Ti
CPU: AMD phenom II 1100T processor
Memory: 8GB RAM
Windows 7 OS
Standard DVD RW 1TB hard-drive