The setup allows you to specify how far from you the various races start, but not how far from each other. I did an experiment where I just kept restarting the game and then looking in the editor to see the distribution of starting positions. There seems to be huge variability in how close players start to each other. I would guess that close proximity between two AI empires will severely limit both of them.
After doing this experiment repeatedly, I desperately want to sit down and write my own starting position code which simply does the following:
- Start with a 2D distribution of N stars in which I need to place M players.
- Do a K-means clustering of the N stars into M clusters.
- Take the star system representing the centroid of each cluster, transform it into the homeworld for one of the races, and stick the race there.
