Just bought the game and am looking at all the many map settings and suffering from choice paralysis.

I'm interested in playing a game that lets me explore all the systems and experiences. I tend to play this kind of games almost like an RPG.  Any suggestions for me about how I should set things up?

This forum seems pretty dead if the only reply is a spambot linking to an arrest listing website and it's not even cleaned up.

I don't really have any advice for you, per se, but you might be able to find what you need on the Steam Community page, or on the Discord server. BTW, I marked those two posts as spam, probably sent out by AI bots.

I will propose to choose a huge map to have many things to discover, with a continent shape average and continent form regular, it looks more natural.

The number of continents should be 4 with a new world.

I like to make the elevation steep and have many islands, the map is in my opinion more beautiful.

I would also recommend to up the number of natural wonders. Those are really nicely done on the map and bring some more colour to the game. In my latest game I set it up so there are more rivers on the map - it makes moving through terrain a little bit slower, but the map looks nicer.