When doing some adjustments to the techtree of my mod, I started a small mapsize, I normally don´t test and got the following startpositions on a random map:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=230554&stc=1&d=1255177586

The map was 226x226 for 24 civs with a distance of 40 between civs,
the settings: Continents with 80 % water

Are there known minimum settings, that such starts as shown here, can be avoided?

Not that I'm aware of. Although never quite that close, more often than not it seems that my little corner of a 256 x 256 map is awfully crowded.

Best,

Oz

That happened to me on a random map, turned out that there was an unusually large number of mountains and volcanos than I've ever had before, only happen the once.

I wonder if they always show up on the human player's starting location or does this happen in the fog of war, unknown to the human player.

I don't know what causes this (it's happened to me a few times too), but I think it probably has something to do with the minimum distance between civs. Try setting it to 20 or something and see if that helps.

226x226 is your "small" map size? :O

The result is quite weird, I've been playing with 24-31 civs on maps that are 140x140 or 160x160 for ages and never had this problem. I suspect the large minimum distance may be responsible, I keep it at 10-11 in my mods. EDIT: Great minds think alike ;)

If you have more than about 160x160 map size, you also risk hitting the 512 cities limit, unless you are using a cracked executable.

Thank you all for your answers. :)

My guess also is, that it has to do with the distance between civs. My -unproofed- speculation about this phenomenon is, that the game checks the distance between the last civ and the next civ it wants to place on the map. If there is no location that fits that check, the game "beams back" the civ to the place where it started that calculation. As this place is occupied with the preplaced civ, the game places the civ back "to the neighbourhood" of the place where the calculation was started.

ha ha, just build a warrior, kill 'em all, and rake in the VPs.

When doing some adjustments to the techtree of my mod, I started a small mapsize, I normally don´t test and got the following startpositions on a random map:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=230554&stc=1&d=1255177586

The map was 226x226 for 24 civs with a distance of 40 between civs,
the settings: Continents with 80 % water

Are there known minimum settings, that such starts as shown here, can be avoided?

When you do the math, with an 80% water setting, you only have a little over 10,000 land tiles to work with, and with 24 civilizations, that comes out to 425 tiles available per civilization, or a 21 X 21 box. That is not a lot of room to work with, and add that large separation distance, and you likely will have problems.