I want to create a custom empire similar to the Lost Colony origin using the Sith. Basically I want to role-play as a country of Sith that separated from the Sith Empire before the start of the game. I used the Sith as a base, selected the generic Galactic Contender origin, changed the name of the nation, planet and home system, created a new Emperor/Empress, and I selected a custom empire spawn region from the traits menu and started the game. But every single time I loaded in I was suddenly controlling the Sith Empire (with all the scripted start options chosen) except I'm not in their starting system. After a couple tries I then created this same custom empire from scratch (rather than using the scripted Sith Empire) as a base from the empire select screen; I selected the Sith portraits, named them Sith, named the empire etc etc. But that also yielded the same results. I figured it may have been because of the species name being shared by the scripted Sith and my Sith, so I changed mine to be called something different (but similar for rp sake) but still the same issue.

So my question is: is it not really possible to create a custom empire using the scripted species/species portraits? Or is there something I've done wrong and should try next?