I had to abandon a run of ~6hs due to the fact that there are no resources spawned for miles and miles and the ones that spawn are behind big biter bases full of difficult enemies, and that's because I didn't knew that this mod altered the way that setting works.

I normally start my games with the starting area maxed out because it's a step a bit above just disabling biters as I don't care for biters too much, but disabling them disables many extra content from the game... so I prefer to max out the starting are and have a long time to build and settle before having to deal with them.

IMHO, the mod shouldn't hijack that setting as it does... it makes perfect sense to be able to have expansion resources near and biters far away, as it probably does also just the reverse of that, for people that likes to play that way.

It's just my opinion, take it for what's worth. Probably won't be the last one that gets bitten by this issue... as I saw I wasn't the first to complain about this.

At the very least, a warning should be added to the description about this feature/change, if nothing else.

It's a bit contradictory in a way.
Mod's role is to spread out resources and encourage train usage. As a result it makes all resources more spread out.

Then you are coming in and selecting largest possible starting area based on your vanilla experience and habits I guess?
Currently this is a 6x multiplier which will create huge starting area. This creates the result you are seeing.
Mod did exactly what you wanted - crated a huge starting area. As requested explicitly by the user :D

I do think that this could be improved a bit by not applying multiplier fully - maybe using half of the starting area size setting not full.
I will check at some point (not developing atm really) because there might also be some bug with enemy spawning. I would think that right outside that huge starting area you should have small enemy bases but that that might not be the case right now (starting area size should be taken into account when calculating biter tier/seriousnes of base etc but it's not I think).

I have also edited descripion of mod a bit to warn about large starting area size consequences.

Thank you for the response!

W.r.t. enemy difficulty outside the starting area: yeah, that would help a lot... as it is, from what I've seen (I loaded the save in the Editor with the same list of mods so I was able to quickly move around and see what's out there...) the enemy bases at the edge are varied, some are small with a few enemies but some are big bases with several big worms (I think bob's enemies adds a lot of them early... might it also due to some kind of mod interaction with that too?)

As I said, big starter area it's just a means to be able to play with biters and not have to deal with them until fully settled... I normally use that when I'm exploring new mods, like in this case, first time playing with Angel & Bobs pack and didn't want the fact that I have to slowly learn my way around to lead me to a failed run due to constant attacks early on, as that would only cause frustration.

If it was a vanilla run, I'd be more reasonable with the use of the setting in a more normal value as I'd already know what to do and what to focus early on.

Hmmm... now that I think about it, I can probably just disable biters during the early phase, and then after that use the Change Map Setting to enable them when I'm more ready to deal with them... that way I can use a more normal starting area value.

I don't think I can salvage this current run though, as expansion resources are way too far away to be able to reasonable get an expansion going before trains, and I don't think I have enough resources in my initial patches that would let me get to trains at all, as I've barely started scratching the surface of the red science researches, and I'm already down to ~200K in the ore patch that produces iron (stiratite, I think?)

Hmm doing this with both bobs and angels would make stuff a bit more harsh.
And big worms are proof that clacualtion is wrong - they should not be right outside of starting area.

If you don't mind a bit of cheating (might not fully work):
Use the edit map settings mod and reduce starting area size.

Then you need to call this to make RSO refresh settings from map settings (or remove/add any mod that causes this also):
"/c remote.call("RSO", "regenConfig")"

After that call /rso-regenerate. It will not touch starting area but it should see new starting area size and start spawning both enemies and resources closer.
Just keep fingers crossed and backup save handy :D

Gotcha, will do! As soon as I can play tonight, still on work duty :P (don't tell my boss) I'll report back as soon as possible! Thank you again!

Awesome... it seems to have worked! With those commands you gave me I was able to reduce the starting area to ~2.5 and increase the the frequency back to 1 (I initially created the map with ore frequency at 0.25, my bad, that certainly also contributed to the extreme lack of ores I originally reported.)

With that I managed to see in the editor that ores spawn closer to me and at that distance the biters have manageable sizes and units (just small biters and small worms and at most 5 spawners in the biggest base I saw nearby,) so I think I can salvage the run this way...

But if they get too much annoying due to pollution, if worse comes to happen, I can delete pollution and reduce the pollution diffusion factor to 0 so they don't get aggroed for a time, at least until I can manage to secure an expansion, in order not to waste too much materials in the meantime dealing with their attacks.

Thank you very much for your support! Best wishes and good luck :)