I played Umbral Choir on the Largest Galaxy size.  The Faction quests ran their course to the end.

However, personal preference, I didn't quite 'fully' enjoy the nature of Umbral Choir since all the empires were so far stretched out it took too long to really undermine the factions... I ended up getting both Science and Economic victory before even doing much of anything else.

Based on the above, I decided to do the smallest 8 arm spiral with 12 factions.  This was fun watching them all kill each other while I went out in stealth to micromanage the outcome of the wars. However, my faction quest stopped at chapter 3. While I love Burning Metal Law, I was looking forward to Hacking Mastery.

I decided try again on the second from the last smallest galaxy and again the Faction quests stopped at chapter 3.

What size galaxy allows for the full quest line to play out?

Each size option lists designed player count in tooltip. From Tiny to Colossal it's 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 players.

Exceptional is basically a stalling version of Colossal, because players have plenty of space to expand to.

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Sublustris wrote:

Each size option lists designed player count in tooltip. From Tiny to Colossal it's 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 players.

Exceptional is basically a stalling version of Colossal, because players have plenty of space to expand to.

Okay?

I was laying down context with the size of the maps to find out if the faction quests cut off at certain map sizes.  On Tiny, Small and Medium, my faction quest stop at chapter 3. However, on Exceptional, it fully completes. Is this intentional or a bug?

What do you mean, cut off? You either fulfill quest objective, or you do not. Or you've completed one quest stage, but next one didn't start after it?

Chapter 1.0 (dust), Chapter 1.5 (Wildlife Unit), Chapter 2 (Accelerated Neuronics), Chapter 3 (Burning Metal), Chapter 4 (Hacking Mastery).

This is the path I take... Tiny, Small, Medium and Large all stop at chapter 3 and do not continue to chapter 4 (hence, 'cut off').

I have only ever reached chapter 4 on an endless size. Also, These particular quest lines, do not have a failure condition (aside from losing your home sector).

1.0 is to discover 10 systems (one could potentially fail this if you were on a tiny and did a 100% before turn 10).

1.5 reach X bandwidth

2 Hack through a special node (can't fail on this)

3 Create 3 backdoors (cannot fail at this either)

You can hack any system, guaranteed if you have 30 free bandwidth and 2 hacking operations.

   First hack is the target you want.

   Second hack goes through your target.

   Both must be started at the same time and at the same speed.

   Trace protocols can only target a single hack and always goes after the highest probability trace.  Passing through has a higher turn count, it is always picked.

   Cancel the pass through faint, the true target gets a guaranteed success. The 30 free bandwidth gets used as a penalty for canceling the faint.

   Without the 30 free bandwidth, you cannot cancel a hack.