It’d be a nice option to be able to choose your starting location on the global map, or at least the continent that you want to start on.
I think people can identify with a game more when they start in their own region of the world. This also, can help with replayability.
Maybe? Though unlike XCom our cell wakes up to the decimated world. I makes more sense to not have control over which cell we start with.
I don’t think PP relies on the real world attachment as much as XCOMs - afterall we don’t defend old cities and factions are specific to PP world.
We should take a breath and wait until bugs being fixed. If (and we bet on it, aren’t we…) it will be done well, most of balance problems be gone at the same time. And all our ideas about extentions should wait for better time. Like Yokes said - for DLC 
But if developers aren’t fully concentrated on fixing, testing and balancing right now, if even a small part of them is trying to add more content - we will get a new raw crushing bugged version instead of stable final release. And new changed date, what is not a worst thing ever actually 
In general, despite the fact that a lot of ideas are also tearing from me, I try to hold my horses in and give developers a chance to make their puzzle meet. I’m trying not to distract and seduce them with new ideas - they have so much work already
I take your point, but I think that a professional game dev team is going to be quite capable of deciding for themselves where they want to invest their time without us needing to stymie the flow of ideas on the forum.
And if an idea does come up that is so good that it takes them away from other tasks, then that idea is probably the one that is so seductive that they’ve needed to be grabbing hold of it all along.
So include ‘random’ as a starting option too.
I think a choice of starting location would be a good option, and I doubt it would be all that hard to program.
I wonder how many people would choose to start in Australasia? Has anyone actually found a base there? I’ve been there in three different games and seen nothing.