Impact of Sector

I am on main branch 77b.

I set up my latest run with sectors to maximum and size of sectors to small, with 20 civs in all. Note: I had a problem getting the game to start until I put in 2-3 designated civs instead of all random.  Seems to be a minor bug.  The result was very interesting.  I should note that this setup wants 32 gb of memory, but I have that, so no problem.

I am now on roughy turn 200 and out of 20 civs, I have contacted exactly four counting me, Arcia (not my favorite but I was trying something new).  I have explored a half dozen or so sectors.  My starting sector had nobody but me.  The from there I contacted two new sectors...one was empty (!) and the other had the Manti.  Going throught the Manti I managed to find one more civ, the Xeloxi.  I pushed on to another sector and I ran into a scout ship (!) from the Drathi.  Haven't seen any of their planets yet.  So this is what might be called a "sector rich" layout, or a "sparse civ" layout, with a lot of room between civs.  I mean there are 16 of them I haven't seen yet.

At this point I have decided to attack the Xelosi, having just obtained large hulls, and having no positive feelings about them.   Yeah, I role play a lot.  I wasn't going to attack the Manti because I have 20 trade routes with them, a war would bankrupt me.  I am wondering whether I will actually find all the other civs.  

The point is that this is a vastly different game from my previous efforts where I  met just about everyone by turn 100.  I think this sparse layout does have some good things and some bad things.  Good is that you can develop your civ without inferference for quite a while.  Bad thing is, well someone hiding in the weeds could be snowballing.   Not the case in this game because I can see from the summary table that I am #1 in influence (it says I am last but that is a known bug), research, manufacturing, economy, and other stuff.

Wondering what others have seen playing with sector size and number of sectors and number of civs.