Lets assume you want a balanced start for multiplayer games. What does a balanced start consist of?



Strategic resources? Is merely having each constellation have the same total number of strategic resources enough, or do they also have to be early-game ones?

Personally, I think the former is fine.



Luxury resources? These provide a huge boost, probably larger than early game strategic resources. How should they be split? An equal number of each category(each research category) in your constellation?



Planet Quality? This is pretty important, but how does it need to be allocated? Do all constellations need to have the same total number of systems? What of the quality? I personally favor having total T1/T2/T3 population fit within a range of +/- 25%. Choose planet types randomly to begin with. Increase the smallest number of total planets in a constellation up to the largest size of planets for this category then scale down the planet sizes of other systems to match if possible.



Advantages/Disadvantages? These can be pretty substantial. I would rank them all Tier 1 or 2 and make sure all constellations have the same 'weight' (+1 for tier 1 positive, +2 for tier 2 positive, -1 tier 1 negative, etc).



What else do you think needs to be controlled for balanced multiplayer? Do you think what I have mentioned so far is too much or not enough?

Ideally selecting a "balanced" option for the galaxy would mirror the galaxy so, assuming a spiral galaxy for ease of explanation, every player had their own arm which was the same as all the others.



Perhaps a touch boring as you'd automatically know the layout of everyone else's arm, but then they'd all know yours too so it's balanced.

But the problem is that each faction should/will differ on their preferences and same goes for what is viable in terms of strategy/meta-game or whatever.



My question, though possibly out of the scope of this discussion, is can we make the races adaptable to so-called poor/crappy starts with no luxuries et cetera and make them competitive without turning each faction into a stale shell of their former selves (though arguably some are pretty stale already).