Errm... it may be slow by today's standards, but it's not really that slow. I remember back in Master of Orion, some high-end research projects could take upwards of 50 turns to finish. 50 turns equals an hour or two. Now, that's slow. :)
I also found it a bit too unrealistic to have a map with 5 star systems and over 100 planets, but that problem can readily be solved via the custom map editor, as was already said. In fact, I already made a custom map with 25 star systems, each having anywhere from 1-12 stellar bodies. So far its working as intended, though I think the "development" phase on such a map will be quite long (as opposed to "early encounters" more compact distribution of planets entails). But, as an old fan of 4X
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