41 Millennia into the sim, most of the empires are badly-fragmented with many smaller states interspersed. Russia and central Asia is especially Balkanized, but even so much as Hispaniola is shared between two different small states and a Russian colony. Madagascar has a fully 7 unique states on it, including everything from the independent orange blob in the middle to foreign colonies to a pair of  two-province minors. Even Tasmania is split 4 ways.

The distribition of wealth is striking and beautiful. Surprisingly, the trade route has moved from Iceland to Svalbard and other polar regions due to geopolitical conflicts. Europe, as a result, is much poorer than in most games, and also much more heavily-colonized. Nearly the entirety of western Europe is controlled by a Tech-Level-1 degenerated empire from Argentina, the second-largest state on the map, which can hold out against the tech-level-8 local states because said local states are extremely poor, whilst the Solar Argentina Alliance has SOME access to trade routes, and also a defensive trait that lets it maintain territory. It has been TL1 for a long time, and rarely ever gains back without undergoing degeneration back to TL1, but its neighbors degenerate too.

The shape of the trade routes, reminiscent is of lightning bolts, roots, or blood veins, seems to be caused by the desire to always take short routes to every destination of wealth, which means the trade route itself is likely as a destination, causing self-perpetuating wealth redistribution from the many to the few lucky enough to live along this gigantic lightning bolt.

This is great, nice explanations too

Looks great :) Interesting wealth observation, it doesn't really scale that well to this galaxy size, I would prefer that those veins were a bit "wider"