I played about twenty more turns and still no contact. After that I gave up and logged in as the computer players. Turns out they were fairly bunched up on the other side of the map and I'd easily cover a 3rd of the quadrant before making contact. That would be fairly boring so I started over. This time and AI and I had homeworlds right next to each other
I don't want to play a game like that either.
Am I doing something wrong with the "Evenly Spread Players Across The Quadrant" setting? The last thing I do is generate the map (so I don't get ruins), do I need to add AIs after I generate the map so they get placed evenly?
Anyways I'll try some more games and once I have something reasonable, I'll restart this AAR.