For those of us playing Wednesday evening, there is one suggestion I would make, which is to install the
"No Clustered Starts" mod from the Steam workshop.
I've been using it for a couple years now (going back to when I was playing version 2.1), and it does a decent job of ensuring that empire starting positions are roughly equidistant from each other, and that you don't have several empires bunched up together. The mod works in multiplayer as well, but all players need to have the mod installed (not just the host player), so that everyone has the same checksum.
That's my recommendation, at any rate. If you guys don't want to play with any mods at all, I understand. I only recommended this one since it should help improve game balance a little, at least when we're starting out.
