Ok, this is what I see in my games: by default all constellation looked like a set of stqart connected with trave routes (not sure the right word for that). There might be or might not be one star in a contellation that is not connected to the main net and is not accessible by default. All constellations are connected by one travel route. Major Civilizations spawn in the main net of one of the constellations, excluding the central constellation. So technically most of the stars except 2-4 can be reachec without studying any technologies right from the start. Should it be like that? Even a tutorial tip says that I am not supposed to be able to reach other constellations by default net.

There are two technologies I can study:

1) Free space travel. It'll help me reach lone stars without travel routes. By I'm not able to use it to travel from star to start freely if they are already connected with a net of travel routes, so I can't use it for anything else, like bypassing guarded systems, systems with locked access, etc. Is there any other use for that technology besides reaching isolated stars?

2) Casimier effect, which, I suppose, should add new travel routes, like in ES1. I don't see it doing anything at all. Should it be like that?

I tried it on all three types of medium sized galaxies that are available now in the game.

Hello,

You are correct in your player placement assumptions ! Can I ask what settings your were playing with ?

If you play on unique constellations, then there is only a single, huge constellation which covers the whole galaxy. If you want to have very segmented constellations, you should try the "many" setting in the pre-game options (accessed in the image below). By default it's set on "few".

About your questions :

1) Free space travel. It'll help me reach lone stars without travel routes. By I'm not able to use it to travel from star to start freely if they are already connected with a net of travel routes, so I can't use it for anything else, like bypassing guarded systems, systems with locked access, etc. Is there any other use for that technology besides reaching isolated stars?

Eventually we want to add the possibility to do just that (by shift - clicking for example), but it's not in yet.

2) Casimier effect, which, I suppose, should add new travel routes, like in ES1. I don't see it doing anything at all. Should it be like that?

Casimir effect unlocks wormholes, it's a special type of route that is travelled in a single turn but consumes all your ships' movement points. If you play in unique constellation there is a risk you won't see any, but they should always appear in any other constellation setting.

Cheers !

Right, I'm playing on unique constellations.  I didn't realise it should work like that from reading the tooltips in GUI. May be it's not explained in tolltips there, or may be I just didn't read it carefully enough. Thanks for explanation!

So how does Number of Constelattions setting work? Is it the same total amount of start split into larger or smaller constellations? Or does it leave constellation size about the same but changes total amount of stars?

No prob :).

The setting will leave the same number of stars, but they will be split in more or less constellations depending on what you pick.