You can play 10 hours on a map and still not meet other races, the game is huge, even on a small map it will take about 20-30 hours, sometimes your leader can almost reach level 5, but shortly before that he becomes insanity and gets - 1000% to experience, the game also contains scientific branches and at the beginning you may be lucky with useful ones, or maybe not so much (since the research being studied works randomly).
Also in the game you should monitor your own government, since even your peaceful race of pacifists can turn into a race that destroys everyone who is for war. The galaxies in the game are huge; exploring them will take a huge amount of time, which you simply cannot keep track of while playing it.
If you like games where everything happens gradually, grabs you with interest and doesn’t let you go, then this is the game you need.