The large maps (only size I play) in game are not random for anything except resource placement and (sort of) starting locations.  There are 3 (maybe 4?) large maps the game uses when choosing large world.  Each map has somewhere around 20 (?) start locations each nation is randomly placed at 1 and resources are randomly generated after start locations and are based on the start locations (and seemingly difficulty setting as well, harder = more for AI, less for you).

If you want to test/confirm this edit your shortcut for the game to look something like this "C:\Elemental\Elemental.exe cheat" the " cheat" at the end is what matters.  Start a new game and push "Ctrl+U" look at the map, repeat until satisfied.

I am really hoping random maps are coming because I'm getting tired of the maps that there are and I don't find the maps created by cephalo's random map generator entirely satisfactory (I'm not sure I've entirely figured it out though) but it's certainly better than nothing and I'm glad it exists.

Don't worry, they already have the solution for this... They'll just delete this thread like all the rest and you all will forget.

They'll also delete all of the past references to the "free expansions" which have magically become "free micro-expansions".

Enjoy. I'm moving to something else.

Sorry I can't find a link to it right now, but I believe it was in a journal. It got taken out because they thought the random map generation was too slow to release at this point. Personally I would like them to release it as an option I don't really mind waiting for a random map to generate but then my gaiming goes back to waiting 5 minutes for a game to load from tape.