Random Civ Generator

[[Shane Hodgson]]

Whenever I play a game on C3C and I select all of my opponents to be random, one civ always seems to escape the randomness of the generator: the English. No matter how many times I start a game with random civs, the English never get picked! And no, it's not because I select the English, as that seems to be the conclusion that many would jump to. Anyone else experiencing this?

[Kloreep]

Frankly, I'm rather skeptical this is anything but a fluke. There is a small chance of this happening, and with all the people playing civ, it's bound to happen to someone.

How many civs are you playing with?

[Switch]

Never heard of that problem, and if memory serves me correctly (woah! Iron Chef flashback. Fequison!), I've played against the English in a random map before (ie, random civs).

One oddity I have noticed, however, and so have other players, is a strikingly common occurance of all of the American civs appearing when random are selected. This doesn't happen every game, but many games have included, not just one or two, but every American civ...other times its been a majority of European civs, but due to the number present that's bound to happen with pure randomness.

[Last Conformist]

If you select "Culturally Linked Start Locations", you tend to get a superabundance of American civs. Just one of them li'l C3C bugs.

I know I've got the English picked as a random civ plenty of times in Vanilla and PTW, but I'm not positive I've seen them in C3C. Might have to run the odd check ...

[joncnunn]

Turn off culturaly linked start locations if you want to increase randomness.

Basically, with culturaly linked start on, the game will try to have all civs in each landmass represented by the same civ group.

One example is my current game which was random civ with random oppoents on random map on Emperor level:

There were two bigger landmasses with two civs each, one smaller landmass with one civ, and a couple of small islands (10 to 15 tiles each) with no civs.

I was given the Celts and had Germany as a neighbor. (Both of these civs are in the European group)

The other big landmass had Persia and Babylon. (Both of these civs are in the middle east group)

The smaller landmass had the Aztecs (American group) in a quasi-isolated start. (Seperated by 2 coastal water tiles and both sides having a mountain, took awhile for both of us to be looking out at the same time, but was able to do so evenually without a boat.)

Naturally, the Aztecs are bringing up the rear from their bad start and inability to get off the island. They'd be a lot further behind except that I needed their Ivory as a 7th luxary to maintaign We Love the ___ Day for so long and often had to use a tech to decrease the price and it looks like at least one other AI did the same.

[Solomwi]

About my second or third vanilla game, right at the beginning, I started getting frustrated. I always played as America (foolish, foolish me) and after having seen it a couple of times... "WTF is this?!? Aztecs and Iroquois AGAIN??? RANDOM CIVS MY... oh, what's this little button marked Culturally Linked Start? Doh!"

[Switch]

But I've played culturally linked starts with non-american civs, and had all five american civs as opponents, plus some random other two. This, though not major, is an annoyance that Firaxis should look into. Maybe the RNG code messed up, or something is screwing with the World Seed.

[Solomwi]

I think that is a documented bug. Just for the random flavor, I long ago stopped playing culturally linked, but do seem to remember a couple of threads about that, perhaps after one of the patches.

[joncnunn]

Yeah, there may be a RNG bug causing it to be more likely for the American group to be represented similar to the old RNG bugs causing Monothesism, Nationalism, and Rocketry to be disportationly granted to Sci civs.