Wouldn't the easiest just be to let the player wait 5 minutes before he starts so the other player has a 'jumpstart'?

Make each player a selectable race and give the mod to all 4 players, forbid anyone from using the other's guy's race. Each race can have different resource gain or whatever you want.

Copy the PlayerX.entity file you want, make it reference a couple new things as far as gain of resources goes, add a string for the player's name or whatever.

You'll be locked to one race unless you will want to do a lot of modding, though

Should work - then just make your changes to the race designated for each person. I'd copy the Player*.entity instead of changing it though, because that way you can have more than one player using the same race.

Oh, and I don't mean "PlayerX", I mean X as in the race name. If you want one guy to play as Advent, you copy PlayerPsi.entity, make it reference a string that says "Player 3!!!!" or whatever, make changes to the appropriate files to speed up resource gain, save them as a different filename and change everything in your new "race" to reference the new filename instead of the old one. You won't overwrite your old races and you'll be able to select your customized race too, as long as you all ahve the mod.