My friend and I are trying to play massive 12-player game with the harder AI, but we always start on opposite sides of the galaxy, which means basically playing two separate games until we both control our respective halves of the galaxy and then just allying and winning. I appreciate that a lot of players are more hardcore and like the competitive aspect, but we like just having fun with it, minmaxing custom factions or playing on ridiculous settings, so we mostly play allied.

The game is really good for this playstyle when it works, which is nearly never because no matter how hard we try, it forces us to be at opposite ends of the galaxy. We've even tried rerolling the map in modding-tools mode until we get a seed with the factions we want in the right location, but when playing in multiplayer it moves us apart anyway, and when trying to save with 1 player when the factions are in the right play, and then join as those factions, the game actually relocated the faction home location to make sure we were far away again. We can't see to get anything to work reliably and it's really annoying, because this seems like a really basic feature.

I get that it doesn't make sense for players to spawn in "teams" when the concept of an alliance doesn't exist until later in the empire development tree but I really can't express enough how frustrating it is not to be able to do this and for it to feel like the game is fighting us in a hidden way.