Hey everyone,

I recently picked up the game with friends a few days ago, and I'm really loving it so far, except the fact that I don't know what I'm doing most of the time because starts be hard.

On our last game, I began with what I think was a really unfavorable starting position, which you can find below:

https://i.imgur.com/bY70QQv.jpg

No tier 0 strategic resources, no directly colonizable systems around without research, and only one type of luxury resource, not on the home system. To top it off, not shown here but 2 of the 4 planets in my home systems had bad anomalies, not just mixed, but plain bad.

The game ended quickly when my unfallen playing friend, just a few systems north, began sitting on both titanium and hyperium, with another titanium deposit one jump away from his home, snowballed from this and decided to make a tree out of me. Even by putting everything into military and production to focus only on making the biggest fleet, I was utterly crushed by him while he rolled with all around higher FIDSI than me.

Now we've only been playing a few games and I can't be sure that my position was actually decent if used in a certain way, but I really feel like the game was decided on turn 0 by this starting position. My question is: is this intended, and if so, is there a way to force balance on this? I checked that the flag on game creation was standard and not chaotic, so it's not that.

In case I'm just bad and this actually has potential, this thread turns into a generic gameplay question: what would you do to make such a position shine? What's good about this and how can I exploit it better? I'm feeling like laying waste on some trees next game.

Thanks in advance,