enable cheat codes? so u are cheating?
End of quote
We prefer cheese.

You start game. Save game. enble cheats take a look. load save. At masso the AI all know where all the planets are, your the only one who does not. So its more like evening the playing field.
It would be very rare to get a decent map and actually beat the AI to a good planet other wise, as they send there colony ships directly to them while you hunt around blind. I would not want to waist hours trying to fluke out a winnable start. This way you decide if the map is winnable. They gave us cntrl N for a reason.
Games with cheat codes enabled do not submit to the meta. So you do not play a single turn with them on. When you reload a game for any reason, Stardock gives the AI the right to rush buy anything they want. They also demand tribute from you. So there is a penalty to pay for using this loop hole so Stardock wrote the penalty into the game because they are aware it is done.
I guess you also could just keep restarting the game after you knew the map without using the cheats but this would take time also but would give you the exact same information.
Every game you play is different even for us and we could easily move to military once we have the big tech lead at 2190 and have some good old fashion AI vapourizing.
Just don't fall into the trap of playing for scores and you'll continue to have as much fun as you are. Once you have a insane pace of scores you have to maintain it or your score degrades.