Good 4-player game setup?

[magnate]

Hi All,

I'm looking to set up a 4-player game with three friends. We want to use a big map, so we don't meet each other too early (and thereby miss out on all the fun late-game spells and stuff). But we don't want to spend dozens of turns fighting nothing but indies, so we want to scatter some AIs around too.

How can I ensure that the four of us start a decent distance apart? If I let the game sort it out, it might start two of us right next door (because it will simply start *all* races as far apart as it can on the given map, but make no distinction between human and AI).

I don't want to specify start locations in the map file because I'm playing the game.

Does anybody know of a 4-player scenario which fits the bill? Or a util which will ensure that human players are scattered with AIs in between? Or, if it came to it, would anybody mind manually coding our start positions into a map file (we're thinking of using Faerun)?

Interested to hear if anyone else has been in this situation.

CC