Hi:
Unfortunately, Zeldor has caught me when I don't have a lot of time to manually do up a set of starting positions from scratch. I did the current set up quickly without knowing who was playing which nation. While it is true that Arco has a nice starting position, it is a wraparound map, and Arco needs to worry about Marignon, Jomon, Atlantis and Utgard.
If players agree that it is too unbalanced, then I'd suggest two things:
(1) start the game over and let the AI set the starting positions. There are several spots that are "no start" on the map, and so, I think there's a good chance that no one will get a "sucky" starting position.
(2) Zeldor or someone else could do up a set of manually placed starting positions that are assigned randomly by the AI. That way, no one will unintentionally favor himself/herself.
It's very easy to edit the map file. The command lines are in the map edit pdf that came with the game. The full list of nation #'s was updated in the modding pdf. Beware that the list states Jotunheim where it should state Jomon. The time consuming part is deciding where the starting positions will be.
As a third choice, I'd be happy to edit the map file, if someone else could tell me where the non-nation-specific starting positions should be.
Pasha