I don't believe there's any particular rule about no-roid starts.

I think the only guarantee is that your home terran will have a phase lane connecting it to the rest of the map.  There is a roid and an ice or volcanic for you, but there is always a slim possibility that they will end up not being connected when the phase lanes are generated in the random map. 

The planet locations are hard-coded with some of them having a probability to be in the map or not be in the map with a probability of their being ice/volcanic/desert/terran and maybe roid or dead roid.  Phase lanes are also generated randomly with an increasing probability that two planets will have a phase lane between them as the distance between them decreases.  However, that leaves open the small possibility that your home terran and its nearby roid will not have a phase lane.

DirtySanchezz explained it clearly on how it works and why it happens.

The solution si that ICO need to make the core starting location triangle of the HW, the roid and the Ice/Volcanic world a hardcode where all 3 of these worlds are always 100% present and are always 100% connected by phase line to each other.

What raging was also refering to is that he was comparing the randomly generated maps when you start a random map to the ingame random map generator. Starting a ramdom map game will have a chance of gettign roid fucked like you said. How ever if you use the random map generator ingame the starting locations will all be perfectly created and will never have a senario wher eyou get roid fucked. That is what Raging Amish was talkign about. He was also asking why does teh ingame map generator generate maps correctly while a random map form multiplayer does not.

I agree with that.  It would be a simple fix.  Also, I'd like to see an end to randomly generated overlapping planets.

Of course, what this game really needs is auto-download for custom maps, which would effectively put an end to bad starting positions and unfair maps.

Here is an idea--what if a mapper modified the Random maps to hardset the asteroid and ice/volcanic phase lanes while perhaps making other improvements?  Only thing is that it would end up being similar to custom maps currently--no one would host the custom random map and people would have to download the custom random and then add it to their Galaxy Forge folder.

The solution:

Create the random map with the in-game map designer. Those maps do not have to be downloaded and placed in the folder. The only problem is it still leaves phase lanes to probability, but with some manipulation one can make the probability of being roid fucked very low. Also you have to get people to play it (which is a problem in itself).

Its true they take quite a bit of tinkering to be playable, but honestly they are the same thing as the random maps. Perhaps I can create one you like Sanchez.

Spent 10 minutes and got one that people liked (if you see Ferdie or TehWinner ask them about it) To decrease the likelihood of a bad roid start, I put 12 extra asteroids on the outer rim where the HWs are. I got the phase lanes to be of sufficient length by populating the middle area with enough planets. Put some neutrals on the outer rim, and dispersed the rest in the middle and close to the star. Previewed it a bunch of times to make sure it there werent any gaps (areas of space where it didnt put any planets at all, or rings of separation creating really long phase lanes), took out the pirate base,  kept it at 88 planets (same as huge random single star) and voila. We ended up having a pretty fair map that no one was dissatisfied with.

It is more likely that a player will have 2 roids (sometimes 3). But in the unlikely event someone has 5 near their HW, that also means the players on either side of them have access to those roids as well (as they are on the outer rim and would be between players. In the 5v5 maps, players are generally 3-4 jumps from each other (unless you put TONS of planets on the outer rim), and on my map those jumps would most likely be asteroids, with a chance of being an ice/volcanic or a neutral well.