Plus, if you have that, "good" players will try to re-roll till they get super startup stats.
I do like a couple suggestions I heard though. The first being that you could start with one free wonder (reminds me of how in Sins of a Solar Empire you start with one free capitol ship XD). That would be an interesting way to speed things along, although most would want the big military wonders. The other I though was good was having specials for certain holidays. I'm not sure what they meant exactly, but I thought it would be cool if say, on Christmas every nation in TE got a free 1mil or something like that.
