It's often hard to obtain decent starts with ancient civs, so I thought we could share some of those we thought to be our best.

what map size? and any custom game settings?

Going to try out the Carthage start anyhow. It is Huge world size, monarch difficulty if anyone else was wondering :D

i will start the india, and pray for the same - if not i will export the save as a scenario through worldbuilder and enter it as a custom for no tech brokering

I don't remember to be honest, they are either large or huge. I won the Carthaginian UHV and India seems doable but I haven't finished it.
The Persian UHV isn't doable on any start IMO, but at least that start seems very good ^^

im going to upload some decent saves as well, with these terms:

They will be autosaves, about 10 turns before the civ actually spawns - this will be so you know there was no worldbuilder, and so you can get some level of randomness.

I will use a few select civ's i have heard complaints/had complaints about.

China
Babylon
Inca
Maya
Aztec
America
Egypt
Ethiopia

I will generate several maps and see what i can do! My goal is to find maps that are both playable and challenging for the Monarch level, with NO Tech Brokering selected. As a reminder, if you hate this option and want to change things, you may open worldbuilder and use the save feature from within it to "export save as a scenario" and use a "custom scenario" to play the save, which will allow you - in theory, to choose a civ (that is somewhat developed) and change my crappy settings if you hate them.

Attached the Persian save with which I won the UHV.