Prevent people from spawing too close to each other?

The spawn system is great and all but occasionally people do spawn really close to each other. This has the effect of making the gameplay non-consistent which may or may not be a good thing.
To fix this I would make it so you are not given multiple spawn locations to choose from, but a single large spawn location that you can pick where ever you want to spawn from inside of.

For 1v1 (and possibly 2v2) you (and your team-mate) would have almost a whole hemisphere to spawn inside of with a decent size buffer zone to separate you from the other player(s).
4 player you could center the zones on a tetrahedron's faces (maby non-circular zones so less space is wasted?).
Larger player games would be a platonic solid with more faces or simply more planets.

These zones should still be large enough to give multiple proper spawn locations to choose from. The only downside I can think of for 1v1 is that you know that the center of your hemisphere is perfectly opposite of your opponent's hemisphere, but at least you still don't know where they will spawn. Not sure how the game chooses which players get which zone, could be random, could be first come first serve, I honestly don't believe it matters.
This could be implemented as a option players decide on before the game starts if people prefer one way over the other.

To state again, the goal is more consistent gameplay. Thoughts?

Yes. Sometimes they start a bit too close for comfort.

That's part of refining the Procedural algorithms.

Mike

I guess part of this is whether we want random starting points.

We could have:

- fixed spots where everybody "owns" for example a quarter planet but you know the enemies positions
- random starting points where you might happen to start right beside an enemy

I would tend to use the second system with some kind of minimal distance between players. Could result in unfair advantages for players though. Just had a game where I was stuck together with 2 players in a triangle. After ~30mins of intense fighting the 4th player ran us all over with his huge army..