(v1.17) Random Empire Starting Locations

As most of your are probably aware, the even distribution of empires is not so even. I ran a dozen or so test ranging from three to twelve empires (all created by me), on max systems (edited settings.txt to ensure the max number of systems), and every time my empire was within two jumps of at least two others. Now this may be stroke of shear bad luck, but in my rule book, twice is a co-incidence; three is a pattern. This seems to certainly qualify as an annoying pattern.