Phoenix, yes , that's a good lesson for the next game. Most of my experience with PBW (very limited) comes from my first PBW game in which we are now in turn 9, and we started with 5 planets. That makes the game interesting much faster, got some fast and furious diplomacy going on now.
That game (and my low ranking in it) has also given me ideas about a much better race design...if only I could have used it in our newbie game..
sigh.
You know..we're only in turn 3...we could always start over with 3 or 5 planets each and all agree on a timeperiod so we could play the first 5 turns or so quickly...