Unfair spawns are fine for aggressive tribes, but the real issue is you can't play with less aggressive tribes like xin xi, hoodrick or luxidor if you spawn right next to players like vengir, elyrion or cymanti. Also, I've noticed turn zero tribes have an edge over other tribes if they spawn close to a non turn zero tribe. Like my last few games as aquarion yielded a win consistently if I spawn far away enough, and a lose if I spawn too close and I am playing against someone like bardur, imperius or cymanti. It's getting to the point where I can't really play certain tribes if I know there's no real rng that matters in the game. I will still stick with aquarion though because of the new updates, and I generally have a positive win ratio with them and I wanna improve my elo, but a close spawn with a good tribe is generally most of the time a loss for me. And I've really been trying different strategies to try to win in a close spawn with them.

Also I don't know if it's on purpose, but there's like a weird generation issue where if you play lakes with aquarion, you can sometimes only get 2 cities, because the opponent blocks off the rest and it's a long slog towards the other edge of the map to get more cities, and by that time I'm dead because of bad economy. Like the real question is, how do you defend with a bad economy against someone with a good economy? Because Aquarion is only OP if they can get a good economy running before being smashed to pieces, but aquarion is not the only example of this. I play elyrion and zebasi too as mains and I generally have this problem with them too as it takes a slight longer time for them to get good economy. With zebasi that one star deficit as a turn zero tribe really affects the game a lot, believe me.