I am getting P O'd here.....

[Dominae]

Originally posted by asleepathewheel
Here's a pretty decent start I had recently on Emperor.

Pretty decent!?!. Imagine if you got a start like that in a DG...it's a dream come true!


Dominae

[joncnunn]

The screen shot I've seeing is an excelent start.

3 COWS and a River!

And don't the Mayas start with the tech for the Granery?
And aren't they industrious and so at least one forest tile will be choped 50% faster than normal once you start building it to speed this improvement up even more?

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by Hagbart
I'm very often (almost all the time) starting very close to the sea.

Could it be anything to do with the fact that you have been playing Seafaring civs?

[CerberusIV]

Marsh and jungle both now come under the clear wetlands command and it takes 24 turns in either case AFAIK.

I thought my starting positions took a turn for the worse after the 1.21 PTW patch. The Conquests starts haven't been any worse than I was getting in PTW.

The only thing that worries me is that three out of the four games I have played long enough to find all my immediate neighbours included the Vikings AND gave them ivory!!! Admittedly I was actually playing the Vikings in one of those games but still....

PS Is it me or do the barbarians now tend to sit there until there is a massive horde of them, then rampage all over the nearest towns. I abandoned one game after being confronted with around 40 barbarian horsemen (I play with raging barbs).

[Jaybe]

Barbs just don't put their forces into action as soon as possible. They are more like a civ, in that they are not always at war with you (sometimes they just want to be left alone).

[Provost Harrison]

I have noticed that they are more likely to fortify, but I thought that it was just taking the best course of defensive action rather than wanting to survive...

[FrostyBoy]

LOL

Here is everyone complaining about starting in bad spots and others loving it when they start in good spots.

"Oh no, I'm surrounded by tundra and I have no luxuries or anything! May aswell restart!"

If only the AI could do that, right?

[vmxa1]

Barbs do seem to be a bit more passive. The starts complaint makes me think of "so very cold".

[joncnunn]

I think the diferences between Jungle and Marsh are that:

1. Location: Jungle is found near the equator. Marsh seems to be found in Temperate regions.

2. City founding: You can't found cities in Marsh [must clear it first]. You can found cities in Jungle.

Otherwise the desired improvement is the same, clear it to expose grassland.

Myself here's how I rate starts: Horid : No posibility of fresh water access to 50%+ of the natural border for my territory within a reasonble timefrime

Poor: A situation where there evenually will be fresh water throughout the territory, but I'm going to have make a long chain of irrigation into the core area or else clear and irrigate a few wetland tiles to accomplish this.

Average: No place within 2 tiles to get a free aquaduct for the starting city, but a place to get fresh water access was found slightly further away.

Good: Starting river with no cows nor wheat

Excelent: Add cows and wheat.

[Forster]

Originally posted by Fried-Psitalon
No luxuries within 5 tiles and you consider this a great offense? Oh, that your civilization might have to actually search for something instead of having it handed to you? C'mon now. While luxuries are more scarce, starts are the same random beast as ever. Besides, the single player community has one rather hefty advantage as someone pointed out above: Ctrl/shft/q. If there was a problem with consistently bad starts, you'd hear about it over on the ladder forum in multiplayer land, where restarts aren't an option.... and while there's all kinds of groaning and moaning about scarcity of luxuries (and some say resources as well) no one's started a rant thread about overall starts yet.

True, single player can always restart. I try not to do that. I guess I got spoiled playing the other civs, because there always seemed to be one luxury near by. I wouldn't restart because of that, by the way. But consider this, I now control almost half of a continent in a game, there are two other civs. Only one of us has iron, and it isn't me! I just don't think iron is that rare a commodity. If it was, it wouldn't be a commodity. I'm up to AD 300 and watching this hoard of swordsmen swarm into my territory. Agggahh!!!

[WarpStorm]

In Civanilla, I remember playing a game as the Romans where I didn't get any iron till the end of the Industrial era. It was all on another continent and nobody wanted to trade it. Skewed maps have happened since the beginning.

[Conqueror]

Hey, i enjoy bad starts. Nothing is more rewarding in a civ game than to build your way to victory from isolated tundra with no resources

Bit masochistic, got to admit

But really, for me, the C3C starts are a big plus - i hated it in PTW when all civs got 6 iron and 9 horses. Its much better now.

[statusperfect]

C3C maps amke for mor einteresting games. I even have to use longbows sometimes (combined with trebuchets and spearmen )

[Scriblerus]

My reflections on C3C are entirely unscientific (one epic game start - being in the UK I only bought it this weekend, and have had very little free time), but I had a good river location (all grassland, but with a few accessible hills for my next two cities) one luxury within reach, and by cranking out a curragh and sending it round the coast I found what seem to be two of three iron resources on my continent and got settlers to them first. Now I'm waiting for the Egyptian demands for a supply from one of the two iron to turn into a chariot rush and to hit my distant and corrupt iron producing settlements.
This feels like a decent set-up to me; not too easy (can't get anyone to trade luxuries), but with strategic points to defend, and some terrain advantages to use.

I can be less scientific about vanilla Civ 3, in which I got endless plains/desert/mountain/no river starts. And I've yet to see what or a cow on my starting screen...ever.

But other people do. I think it's just random, but with thousands of players out there, some are statistically likely to get long runs of good or bad starts.

[ZargonX]

In my current epic game, on a standard map, continents, there are only 4 sources of oil. Fortunatly, I am lucky enough to have one within my borders (er... former viking lands, but let's not discuss that ). With oil so scarce, I can only imagine what it will be like when uranium shows up. But, just makes for some new strategies then, doesn't it?