Just started playing, I don't get the game

Have you played spore?

You know... the space empire part of spore?

colonizing one planet... increasing its habitability... stablizing... ad infinum?

Thats what we like to call "grinding".

Managing a 1000 planet empire is NOT FUN.  Seriously.  Its not. 

so, back to sins....

You can always make custom maps with very few planets in a star system, and many star systems.

You can even make it so that the choke points are maintained by never linking your planets to the star, so that the game map is similar...

but... that map would be stratigicly the same as the maps in sins are currently.  No point in making the maps more confusing than nessasary.

or... even better...

Phase lanes are not forced to follow the most direct paths to planets.   Planets could be annnywhere, the ones you see are just the most important ones, and the ones connected to the phase network.  The map is just a simplified layout, so it doesnt look all confusing and stupid.  (played some of those old games with phase like nodes between planets, where everything is 3d?  try a 1000 star map in those!)

And, besides... each battle is just a small part of the war.  thats why each map is called a "mission".

Besides... there are some nice SOL maps with many, many planets.... all real.  just because its a "planet" doesnt mean it cant be, oh... a planetoid or moon.  you know how many moons jupiter has?  ALOT.

Well keep in mind some star's probably do have dozens of planets. Its just the only way to detect planets is a rather cumbersome process (that is still being refined) which involves looking for variations in star light which could hit that a planet has just passed by. In the next decade we are almost certain to jump from around 500 planets discovered to well into the thousands. Also anything besides a Star is considered a "planet" in Sins, so by this definition asteroids alone would give our solar system hundreds of planets.

That astronomy bit aside, some maps like doppelgangers are made up of small solar systems with a hand full of planets, so try one like that. If that still doesn't meet your taste, download the galaxyforge and make a map to your hearts content. The in game map designer might also be able to more crudely do what you want, but keep it somewhat random and in much less time.

Last count was 63 moon orbiting Jupiter with uncountable moonlets.

Just think as Sins operating in a parallel universe (think of Fringe) where there can be many planets to one star, and with billion upon billion of stars out their in our universe, just because we don't have 28 planets orbiting our star doesn't mean that every star has to have only 8 planets, some stars have 1, some have hundreds, some have none

It's a great game if you can get past this part, especially for online multiplayer against human opponents (which is the "real" Sins game).  Once you get up to speed you'll probably accept it as a game and never contemplate this issue again.

It's tactical and local strategic combat within the "grand universe'--think of it as a theater or front in a large war...it isn't the whole war--just a part of it.  Create a campaign and you can link them in play--if you can find some people with  three or four months to finish playing it.

Sins would actually be an awesome game in a persistent universe mmo....drool, slobber.

I made a map of our own solar system one time using colonizable asteroids for the mid sized moons and ice planets for some of the bigger moons orbiting the gas giants.  Guess what, our own solar system has a ton of gravwells when made into a Sins map.

Some solar systems may have almost no planets, some probably have hundreds, counting large moons.

You can also make maps with many star systems if you choose, the custom map generator lets you do that.

That unrealism in stock maps annoyed me too.. I hope it gets fixed at least in official maps included in Sins 2. So I made a more realistic map (cca 10 objects per star, many stars) in Galaxy Forge (based on the FreeSpace Universe). Download it here - https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/sins_maps/273/ 

The problem with realism if you need to have orbital paths and movement and the affect of gravity wells on jump paths to make it "realistic".  As most games do, these things are abstracted in favor of play simplicity.

We don't have holodeck games yet.  Have to deal with it.  LaGrange points, gravitational slingshot trajectories and movement into and out of gravity wells just are too much to simulate and have the sort of play present.

SIN - that kind of realism obviously is not possible, and may be even detrimental to gameplay.. But I dont see any reason why more realistic system composition would not be possible or bad, even in current Sins. Having 10 earthlike planets in a single system is just crazy. Objects like asteroids, asteroid belts and junk fields are all right even in large numbers, but not earthlike planets and gas giants.

Ok, so that's just being silly. There are different levels of realism, I never said i wanted the game to be 100% accurate and to have to need the power of 20 computers to calculate the trajectories of faster than light travel.

I'm a fan of star trek and I liked galactic civilizations 2, so the bizarre layout of this game was quite jarring for me. I may give it a go but I'm not sure how anyone at stardock could have even designed the game like this and thought it was a good idea

Well to each his own, but the game of the year awards beg to differ with you. Just download some of the maps people have made with lots of star systems if thats what you want.

This was debated and thought about during the design. But I don't think you guys realize how boring and predictable it would be. Every planet close to the star would have to be barren/volcanic. Every planet in the habitable zone would have to be Terran. Every planet farther out would be barren or gas giant. Can you play on essentially the same map for a year? It may be realistic, but it's not "fun". It's boring, it's unbalanced, and it's utterly predictable. This is one good case where fun trumps realism.

Says who? Our technology is nowhere near good enough to detect earhlike planets easily. Even some of the ones we have found at several times larger than Earth and some are still being debated (like Gliese). Just because our solar system only has 1 (currently), doesn't mean that's the rule of the universe. The only planets our technology reliably allows us to find are massive gas giants, they make up the vast majority of known planets.

ya, who knows... the "desert' planets in game just might not be completely terraformed yet.

In that respect, the only confirmed peculiarity in Sins is the relative rarity of gas giants.  Most randomly generated maps have... one or two tops.

Anyways, if you need a justification, there's actually a relatively simple one.  Systems with lots of profitable, habital planets are more likely to be fought over.  The small systems with no resources and scant habitable planets probably don't see much real fighting.