Are you using default or advanced worldgen? What are your worldgen settings? Worlds with excessive good, evil, or savagery will have a hard time placing civs.
I'm using default worldgen with medium world, short history, frequent minerals and everything else set to medium. The error is that it is unable to place a controllable civ. I took another look at the read me and it mentioned that the modest moduels can be extracted it any order and I've been going accelerated first then modest bodies. Also figured I should mention that when playing it without the modest modules active my worlds had no iron deposits, which was a bit strange. I'm sure I'm doing something horribly wrong on my end.