We had a few games yesterday that were pretty damn tilted to one player
Random maps are notorious for this sort of thing. The map giving a specific player an advantage is just par for the course. You really only need one well-placed asteroid belt or asteroid near a homeworld and that player gets a huge boon because those are easy pickings for your early-game economy which in turn results in a mid-game boost. The worst part is what we call "map-screws". These go beyond a simple disadvantage to the point at which they are completely crippling. The opposite, "map-boons" where someone has a jaw-dropping advantage also happen, but are rarer than map-screws.
Typically, large numbers of asteroids or uncolonizable wells with lots of resource rocks near your start location is considered ideal. These are so easy to acquire that your capital ship isn't needed, allowing you to immediately divert it to colonizing the middle of the map while your regular frigates can pick up all the easy stuff (very quickly, I should add) without any support. The worst-case scenario is when you have few or no asteroids in a close proximity to your homeworld, and only a few planets with heavy militia guarding them. Empty neutrals (uncolonizable wells with no resource rocks) are also considered bad.
Should be easy enough to make all the phase lanes the same lengths on the mirrored maps too
Phase lane length isn't actually as big a deal as you might think. Far more important are the angles of those phase lanes. The difference between a long or short jump might be 20 seconds or so. The difference between just turning around to make an acute angle jump or having to cross the gravity well to make an obtuse angle jump may be a full minute. If it's the star, maybe two or three minutes. That's far more significant.
