Tarth , hmm master scouts op much? At the absolute least they need to make it 2 points. Ythril, Gilden, and Kraxis definetly due to those sovs having excellent early game traits. Bad early game for the ai is almost a death sentence it still reaches a kind of shutdown point where it can't expand and doesn't know what to do, I refer to this as "stalling out".
A big factor in this is the MinDistanceFromStartingPointsin the coregoodiehuts.xml not being adjustable per map size, i.e. on bigger maps an ai that gets hemmed in by high level monsters at the default 12-16 avg distance gets crushed by ais that are able to spread, there is no catching up. If SD doesn't change it I will in my mod but it will have to be a tailored coregoodiehuts.xml for a specific map size. It would be really nice if they put in ...
<GoodieHutType>
<MapSize>
<Medium>
<MinDistanceFromStartingPoints>12</MinDistanceFromStartingPoints>
</Medium>
<Large>
<MinDistanceFromStartingPoints>16</MinDistanceFromStartingPoints>
</Large>
</MapSize>
</GoodieHutType>
Medium/Large/etc would be the Internal name from CoreMaps (so you could add custom map sizes) and any attributes you place in that element only apply for that particular map size. And it would be nice to know the general starting position algorithm so we know the average grid distance between players so we could set the minimum spawn distances accordingly.