Map generation gives unfair locations each time!

How many races are you playing? If you're playing all 9 races including yourself on a tiny, large, huge map it's most likely going to be unfair sometimes. But on a gigantic when I'm playing max races I don't really have a problem.

Also try abundant star setting; it might help

well, it DOES give you a crap starting position more often than not but i think i know the reason. i think i drops you first and fits the rest around you. because you get dropped first you have the full map available to be placed on, including every potentially bad spot. the following have a lower chance of getting a bad spot if you happen to land on one. in addition every following ai has a chance of landing next to you, pinning you while having an open side for itself. depending on the number of ai and the map size this tendancy can be pretty strong. also clustering of available planets means more tendancy to land on the edge of a cluster, there necessairly being more edge than center. edges being bad, sometime only a little bad, other times alot bad. i seriously doubt your being intentionally screwed by the programmers, it's just a quirk of the code. you can always test it somewhat by building the largest map and having just 1 ai. take a race with stellar cartography to get the best feel for the map and examine it to see how bad your placement seems without all the other races there to pin you. i expect you will find that the ai gets the worse spot about 50% of the time, or only a tiny bit less. it may be biased for dropping you near the edges as well, based on how often that seems to happen to me. hard to tell that sort of thing for certain when i only generate a map once a week usually

increasing the number of systems and the distribution of them to be evenly(less clustering) spread WILL improve your odds conciderably if this is the case. so will reducing the number of opponents. larger maps also help so long as you don't overload on opponents

hope this helps a bit. and while i am hoping; i hope am RIGHT, lol

Its true, the map generator sucks.. I play always gigantic maps abundant stars with 4 or 5 other races. I have to try again and again start new game with another map but most times they are bad and I give up.
I play as custom race, my race or the other ones have very bad locations
for example at the corner of the map with few stars around and then empty space.
Not fair. At the start of a new game there is a selection for a custom map but how.. there is no map editor to create our own.
Stardock should update the game with a better map generator or a map editor.

PS. why my medals, signs etc. do not appear???????

5 races on large map.

bump

never fails for me but usually I have 2 other races jammed about 1-2 stars away from me. And then it's a slug fest of Colony Ships rushing everywhere.

I always play Large,Scattered,5 other races.

Have the icon on that shows where the races are in the mini-map.

If you don't like the set-up, immediately hit Ctrl-N as soon as the mini-map shows and it will generate a new map with the same set-up.

I generally like to play just a couple of opponents on a large map and I don't like everyone squeezed together. Yeah, it's cheating of sorts but there should be an option in the map creation about whether you want the civs apart or randomly set.