Something is wrong with map generation and civ placement in the game. Last week I tried a lot of games with "Large" galaxy size, "Many" sectors option, with the civ placement is set either "Distant" or "Far". I started these games with either 15 or 16 civs (recommended for this setup is 17).

Every time I got one really large sector with only 3-4 civs starting in it, so these lucky civs had a lot of expansion options before even encountering their closest neighbors. And the remaining map consisted of a bunch of extremely small clusters in which the other civs are all crowded in next to each other with very small territory, and only a few planets and resources to claim.

This inbalanced placement repeats itself over and over again, so these games aren't enjoyable at all. Devs, pls look into map generation mechanics, and especially the civ placement option, because something is obviously wrong here. The game should have a "Balanced" option for civ placement (like in Civ6), which would calculate equal distances between starting homeworlds, so all civs would have equal possibilities to expand.

Furthermore, it would be nice if we had an option to set the min. and max. sizes of the generated sectors in the game.

Thanks for reading and taking these issues into account.