Disclaimer
This is what SyncViews and me consider fun maps. There is logic and game design behind it, so it's likely that this is great fun for others as well, but it doesn't guarantee it suits your style of play.
The goal
- Useable starting area
- Spread out resources that promote use of trains
- Much less dense biter nests, again to promote trains, but also so you don't spend time clearing for hours
- Regions that have several patches of one specific ore
- No exaggerated amounts of uranium or stone
- (optional) No relocation of mining stations or trains
- RSO (obviously)
- (optional) Angel's Infinite Ores
To get good starting areas you need nothing but RSO. The mod will guarantee that your starting area has all resources and water, depending on config. Promotion of trains is also standard in RSO, though I tweaked that a little.
The general idea behind what I did was to set larger regions than usual in RSO, but with a 100% chance of resources and setting the "patches" per region to Min:2 Max:4 for most types of resources. What this does is it creates specific regions like an iron ore region in which you find 2-4 patches of iron ore. Thanks to larger region size they are NOT so close to each other that they might as well be one big patch.
Uranium and stone are not needed in large quantities so they get zero chance to spawn and only occur as multi-resource nodes next to the other resources. This way you find them very regularly, because they can appear in all types of regions (copper region, iron region etc.) - but you won't ever have a stone region with 4 patches of stone that no one will ever need.
There is two reason for expanding your train network - you need more throughput or the resources ran out. The latter doesn't actually mean expanding though, just relocating. I don't want that. That's where Angel's Infinite Ores come into play. This is personal preference however and you might opt out of that, which is very easy (just don't use the mod).
Settings & Config
Just a quick summary of what is changed, I will attach my config. Reason is, if my files here get outdated and I don't update them you can still read what to change and do it yourself.
Config.lua -> Multi resource factors set to 1 and endless resource modifier also set to 1 (we don't want RSO messing with our settings by applying multipliers)
vanilla.lua -> Spawns per region set to Min:2 Max:4, Allotment of Stone/Uranium = 0, size of patches around 20 (I used 18-22, less for stone/uranium), multi-resource chances 0.3 and only stone/uranium are allowed to spawn as multi-resource but for all resources, (when using Angel's infinite ores) richness set to very low number so yield won't be above 100%
For starting resource: size=30, with that you can get to green science and after that you need to build trains
Ingame:
Angel's infinite ores: ore minimum yield = 100
RSO
Additional options:
Starting area - if you choose a very small starting area the "region" you start in will be much smaller, so non-starting resources might be reachable without trains. You can also go for larger starting areas if you want to make sure no resource is close, but "normal" should usually be enough to warrant trains.
Results:
Starting area is southeast of my character's dot (just look where all type of resources are close together and a lake nearby).
Screenshots
Not the best examples, but it works pretty well. Me and SyncViews started a multiplayer game with the very first map I rolled, without even checking it in any way or form, because we were so convinced of these settings and we were not disappointed.
The map we are playing
Edit: It probably is smart to make coal also not spawn naturally and only next to oil/iron/copper - for that the multi resource chance needs to go way up, the multi_resource_chance_diminish needs to be very low and coal needs bigger weight than stone/uranium for multi-resource.
Reason for this edit is that coal seemed to be a bit ridiculously abundant in my games and I don't feel like one needs that much.