PlanetsCentral

For example, for five couples - the map should be something like a five-pointed star.

I think we're talking about different things. It sounds like you're suggesting a game mode where alliances are pre-made?

I'd be OK playing in a game with restricted alliances, perhaps as describe above, 5 groups of 2 players that are permanently fully-allied, all other races are permanently enemy. And you don't know who you'll be paired with when you sign up for the game. Perhaps it would need to be a manual alliance-making process by Stefan to pair up races, with effort to avoid super combinations (Lizard+Borg, Privateer-Crystal, etc).

For an automated system, I would love to see some kind of system where you sign up for the game but not any specific race. The system would then do a round-robin assignment of players to teams, perhaps based on Ranking, so that the top-5 players are all on different teams, and each paired with a lower-ranked player, and not of their choosing. Races are then semi-randomly assigned to each player (viable race pairs should be considered ahead of time to avoid said super-pairings).