Don't know why this happens and how to reproduce it... but something is very wrong with systems where there are no spawns to choose from. This happened on a radius 1000 planets with 820 metal. No symmetrical metal nor start locations. When I preview the start locations there are so many green circles on the planet that I can't even tell if they're spawns or part of the planet's texture. I tested VS 6 AI and it worked fine, but when I played with 7 people in an FFA it broke. Waiting 2 minutes does nothing, I think. It also was reported on a friends system, another large moon with lots of metal. It's a pretty bad bug, as you can imagine.