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Imho the generated star maps need some balancing.

In my acutal running MP game i'm cut off from progress due limited plantes aviable.

I had access to 8 mid-quality planets until around turn 280 and no contact to other races except the humans, which I destroyed withing the first 100some turns.

Access to other systems required the tech to travel through unstable warp-points.

That is just RNG doing It's work

It is similar to Civ where maps are randomly generated.

Hmm

I do not know whether to hate or not, because every now and then You will get some insane start, like placed beside a system with 5 planets 3 of which are huge ultra rich barren, and one medium Gaia and one whatever.

And sometimes Your 5 closest neighbor systems are full of ultra poor, small, radiated hellholes

But that makes the games interesting, You can challenge yourself to play through the first seed you get whatever it will be.

Yes and no. It might be better to offer some balanced multplayer maps - or - optional - some preselected random seeds for maps which work well in terms of balancing.

Since multiplayer games do take much longer than a singleplayer vs. AI - game, it's quite  frustrating to figure out after 24+h RL-time-investemement, that the lack of enough manpower/planets due RNG makes you a light afternoon snack for the two remaining superpowers.

Strategy-wise  I might have had a chance with a research-focus-race going for the research-victory. But as a terran khanate i'm pretty much screwed.

For the moment I continue, while both sides are at war. But since both sides are duking it out with serveral 50.000 strength-fleets, while I only could muster one 50.000-fleet.....

But without varying map conditions games would be very similar.

Civilizations depend way more on their surroundings than their quirks.

And while the games would be more "balanced" in a way, They really wouldn't be that much different from one another.

No matter how different the races are, They will always converge towards one point. The greatest differences are always in the early game,  that would be even more uniform, And that is something this game already has a problem with.

Reducing randomness in multiplayer slightly? Eh, maybe. In singleplayer? Nah.

For competitive multiplayer it is probably a good idea to add in some pre-set planet layouts , similar to how they have balanced maps available in Sins of a Solar Empire. Maybe in a future expansion we will get a map builder. But to start with for organised play, then you want fair starting conditions. But for single player, then I like it how it is now, with one exception. The exception being when it puts 4 out of 5 races 2 star lane jumps away and the 5th race out in the galaxy, 8 jumps or more away. I would like starting positions to be far more balanced, but the planet distribution, then I like the randomness for single player. 

If you hate your starting conditions, you have maybe played 10 minutes to see the first 4-5 systems, you can just start a new game? 

Actual mulitplayer game:

Setting: Spiral galaxy / huge / very hard / 2 RL players, rest AI fillup / me playing as Silicoid

We are around turn 170

Due to a very good starting position I outperform everybody in any section of the game. In excellence points I have something around 120.000 while the other races are around 35.000. This convinces me that multiplayer balancing  needs some work.

Will post some thoughts on this toppic tomorrow but now it's bedtime for me ;-)