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All starting locations are not created equal, of course.
I'm in the middle of a game in which my starting settler began on a site featuring 2 gold, incense, corn, and (a few turns later) horses.
This looks good at first glance, but as I have played it out, it seems it could have been better. The gold makes for great science, but it has also slowed down the growth of my capital. The corn helps, but I'd rather it had been fish or something else seaborne - I can't have both a farm and a cottage on that tile. And the incense took a little while to make useful.
On top of all that, the landmass that I started on had room for one more decent city, and the rest of it was tundra/ice (archipeligo map).
(Luckily I was playing the Romans, found iron in among all that ice, and was within a short boat ride of Louis 
)
So now my revised wish list for an ideal start site would be:
Coastal city site;
Not too much water, but all food specials in the water, preferably 2+ of them;
2+ of gold, gems, or cow. (deer and silver are nice, too, but they seem associated with otherwise undesirable terrain...); and
A river.
I don't generally see a lot of floodplains - but when I do see them, they tend to come with a lot of nearby useless desert tiles. So I'm not a big floodplain fan.
Is it pretty much a given that if you get a good starting site for your capital, there will be some offsetting detriment to the start (e.g. small island, lots of desert, stuck on the end of a peninsula, etc)?
I'm in the middle of a game in which my starting settler began on a site featuring 2 gold, incense, corn, and (a few turns later) horses.
This looks good at first glance, but as I have played it out, it seems it could have been better. The gold makes for great science, but it has also slowed down the growth of my capital. The corn helps, but I'd rather it had been fish or something else seaborne - I can't have both a farm and a cottage on that tile. And the incense took a little while to make useful.
On top of all that, the landmass that I started on had room for one more decent city, and the rest of it was tundra/ice (archipeligo map).
(Luckily I was playing the Romans, found iron in among all that ice, and was within a short boat ride of Louis )So now my revised wish list for an ideal start site would be:
Coastal city site;
Not too much water, but all food specials in the water, preferably 2+ of them;
2+ of gold, gems, or cow. (deer and silver are nice, too, but they seem associated with otherwise undesirable terrain...); and
A river.
I don't generally see a lot of floodplains - but when I do see them, they tend to come with a lot of nearby useless desert tiles. So I'm not a big floodplain fan.
Is it pretty much a given that if you get a good starting site for your capital, there will be some offsetting detriment to the start (e.g. small island, lots of desert, stuck on the end of a peninsula, etc)?
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