I read up an answer on these board about this, I tried to search for the link it because it was more detailed, but I couldnt find it back. to give you a summary about it : it was about how AI decide where to build town in Civ game. I'm not sure what a CoC game looks like, but since its resources base it should be similar.
You just basicly build a basic town placement AI. When you generate a map, you give a startingValue integer to each "square" or hexagone, or however you split your map. You recalculate to adjust the value whenever a player makes a new town, or "spawn"
You have to determine what gives a good value to a starting location, and give it an score. to be fair, spawn to player at locations with similar score, even if the resources differs, as long as the total point is similar, it should be fair.
close to a gold mine = +5 points
distance to nearest enemy > 5 = +3
distance to nearest enemy < 10 (encourage aggression) = 5 point
on water's edge (port, fishing, etc ) +3
close to XXX luxury resources = 2 points
close to food resources = 8 points.
...
you can add a lot of options here. if you want to force players be to relatively close to each other, only spawn startingValue point ( thus making these valid for a new player) in the 15 radius-square closest to the 1st player, etc.
Now just decide how you want to spawn your player, and what you consider to be fair.
Ex : You have 3 player, you spawn them on locations with 10,11 and 11 points, even if you have 2 other location worth 15 points, since it wouldn't be fair to the third player.