We played a game not long ago where 1 player had a really low planet amount in his hand (before setting up the board), the planets that he did have where all of fairly low production value too. This made for a really hard game and possibly quite unfair and unbalanced.

would/do you alow to redistribute the systems if a player has this situation? Any home rules regarding this? What qualified as really low etc.

Never actually met anyone who does The whole "building the galaxy as part of the game" thing. The game takes so long that pretty much everyone I've met has had someone build the galaxy before everyone else arrives, either to a pre planned pattern, randomly, or that person gets last pick of starting locations. That way, everyone can get right into the actual game.

That said, isn't the point of dealing all the hexes to players that if someone gets bad draws they can try and place them around other player's areas, or just spread them out across the whole board.

Well sure you can ditch out some of them to other players. But most of the times you get a pay back with another empty system. No one ever gave a planet with let's say 2 prod to another player in my games...

In my experience, when someone has a really bad hand of systems, others have fairly good ones. So when you relentlessly put bad systems in other players' territories, they don't have a choice but to give you half-decent ones, especially toward the two or three last rounds of placement. From what I've seen, a player starting with a really bad hand often ends-up with a decent neighborhood, and is able to handicap other players enough to balance it out.

Also, empty systems are easy to control, which is good for certain objectives.

Sometimes it's good not to be threatening from the start. I've seen plenty of games where the most advanced players run out of steam after turn 5 and start fighting one another enough to lose their headstart.

That being said, the galaxy generation is a game within a game that requires a certain amount of luck and strategy, and I know that people use preset maps exactly to avoid situations where animosity begins before the game even starts.

A preset map? Any examples?

I'm away from the game presently, but I believe there is one or two in one of the rulebooks, or perhaps I'm confusing it with this document from the FFG site. Community-made preset maps are also easy to find on internet.

Yeah, I always use the preset maps from the product page. Can be set up ahead of time, more or less balanced, encourages interaction and competition for the center systems.

My group has never been a fan of making the galaxy creation thing a "competative" part of the game. The general thinking is that the game is 6+ hours long typically, no one wants to start the game at a major disadvantage and its hard enough already with certain races to win, so getting screwed on systems in general can result a pretty unfair and largely unfun experiance. The goal is to keep everyone engaged and have a tight game.

Our house rule has always been that we create the galaxy first, then we randomly place starting home systems afterwards. Since no one knows what position they will be starting at, everyone is highly motivated to create a balanced galaxy. We have always wound up with very close, very competative games, with a typically very balanced galaxy as a result. So nothing is lost, everything is gained.

I think the main issue with the standard rules version is that you begin the game with this big luck factor and while I understand their is some strategy to tile placement, in general the rules are very stifling and someone enevitably gets screwed starting the game knowing they aren't likely to win. Having low level production just makes the racial tiers that much wider. Some races can still do well even with lower then average production/influence, other races just become that much less likely to win.