http://i165.photobucket.com/albums/u59/Yobytsorf/Civ4ScreenShot0008.jpg

Theres a lot of difference in what you get for your starting city. This is a weird example of 4 silver (if you had buildt on the Oasis), but, not usable due to lack of food.

When playing on tiny, Great plains, you'll get heaps of resources concentrated at your start site, but on larger maps, fewer.

Does anyone have a grasp of the underlying mechanisms deciding the quantity and quality of the distribution of resources, and those appearing around your starting settler?

If you have some extraordinary shots of weird, good, or bad starting screens - please share them :)

well the Great Plains map is definitely a weird case. the resources are always in "the same place". not the same exact tiles, but the same regions. going by memory, there's never marble in the east or uranium on the west; there's always lots of deer in the east and cows in the middle. so the RNG doesn't matter nearly as much for that map. same thing for the oasis map: horses are only in the north or the south, but i forget which atm oopsies. i can't remember whether any other resources are only in certain regions on oasis map.

bottom line: those two maps pretty much ignore "the underlying mechanisms deciding the quantity and quality of the distribution of resources, and those appearing around your starting settler" *giggle*.

Take a look at this one :

http://img231.imageshack.us/my.php?image=civ4screenshot0012ij5.jpg

3 clams, 1 grassland cow, and rice for an incredible amount of food and grassland forests for acres... basically it was able to support just about the max amount of specialists possible until I stopped playing and still generate good production. Then later on plop in the National Park and switch to Caste System, maybe... and.... :D:D:D:D:D The land around it is amazing as well. Pretty entertaining game if anybody wants to play it. Settings are Monarch unrestricted leads Hannibal of the HRE Tiny Fractal map 4 AIs.

And, same settings, I'm almost ashamed to play this imbalanced start location....

http://img517.imageshack.us/my.php?image=civ4screenshot0013uo3.jpg

I came across an AI starting location that I thought was pretty sweet:

http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/3647/civ4screenshot0011wi2.jpg

That was on a Hemispheres map, Temp climate.

This one kinda boggled my mind when I saw the AI get it:

http://img505.imageshack.us/img505/5214/civ4screenshot0024dp6.jpg

3 gold, 2 floodplains, 4 wine, 1 corn, loads of forests and a total of 14 river adjacent tiles.

@Frostyboy
(totally off topic - and for norwegians)
Diplomis :lol:

This one kinda boggled my mind when I saw the AI get it:

3 gold, 2 floodplains, 4 wine, 1 corn, loads of forests and a total of 14 river adjacent tiles.

Oh my, and it looks to be defended by only 2 archers?! I sure hope you're doing what I think you're doing with that stack of axes!

That Persian spot is droolworthy

This one is not mine ( came from the Funny Screenshots thread , but I keep it just to post when somebody says that plains fur does not exist ):
http://i184.photobucket.com/albums/x257/r_rolo1/furaplenty.jpg
As the silver start, not enough food....

Thanks for sharing so many great starting spots - some of them are simply amazing!. The last one and the Persian (the droolworthy :)) are unbelievable! -But that's perhaps because they're from huge maps? Usually play tiny or small myself to go faster.

Hope I get a real good treat soon; but then, the Computer often get as good starting spots as well.

Please show some more folks :goodjob:

Oh my, and it looks to be defended by only 2 archers?! I sure hope you're doing what I think you're doing with that stack of axes!

Heh, as long as he doesn't do it across a river ;)

I have a few ones. The first shows a really crappy starting location I got. The orange spot is where my settler started out. The orange in the lower left is not an AI though, that's my settler, but the other two are AIs. This was supposedly on a huge map, too, iirc:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/98118/BadLoc.jpg


These are a lot better:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/98118/City1.jpg

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/98118/City3.jpg


This is from my current game and, man, this is one heckuva production city!

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/98118/city4.gif

Great Plains maps have a kind of border-mountain line, which is where you sit at.
If you look at this in world builder, it looks like a vertical mountain range from north to south.
It is located to the left and right corners of the map in normal games.

and this is where the most strange ressources/tile combinations occur, like dye on a desert hill.

Id settle on the south-eastern silver though, or restart since you dont have much to eat there.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/uploads/120366/fooood.JPG

(Those riverside towns are producing 10c not 5c as the pic may suggest)

...huh??? How is that possible???

...huh??? How is that possible???

riverside = 1
Town = 4
PP = 1
Freespeech = 2
Financial = 1

that's nine, please tell me where the last one is, poster?

I'd crap myself if I ever had starting positions like that...

riverside = 1
Town = 4
PP = 1
Freespeech = 2
Financial = 1

that's nine, please tell me where the last one is, poster?

he's in a golden age, but those are few and far between :( (you can see the golden age icon in the top-right.) that solves The Caper of the Missing Commerce

I'm about to try the Dutch; but can somone answer me. Do you have to be next to a river to build the Dikes, just like the levee?

I'm about to try the Dutch; but can somone answer me. Do you have to be next to a river to build the Dikes, just like the levee?

Riverside or seaside

I've noticed that *every* starting position has at least one food source, but you might get something lame like plains cow alongside a bunch of plains.

I've also seen more plains incense in BtS.

Seaside as well - that's great. Makes it one of the better UB's in the game.