Maybe it's just the luck of the dice, but I played one Carthage game so far and it ended up like this:
- I started on the coast, near the mouth of a large bay, accross which there was a large peninsula with mountains in the middle
- opposite from that coast, there were TWO inland seas, connected by a choke point, and connected to the ocean by yet another choke point. On the largest inland sea, there were 4 capitals for: England, Spain, Netherlands, and Polynesia.
Egypt founded a city on the choke point between the ocean and the small inland sea, I founded a city near Amsterdam to form yet another canal, used my Quinquiremes to take Memphis, and instantly had access to traveling to the large inland sea and later on (in Modern/atomic era) dominated that inland sea with my ships. Made wars against those civs way easier, being able to move my fleets in and out of that sea.
I also settled accross the mountains to gain the Ulrulru on the peninsula(however that is spelled), and extra gold/copper resources, and founded an extra city there too for good measure and again my fleet helped out against Mumbai which was founded in that bay and later conquered by Polynesia, again my destroyers made that easy to conquer.
And all my cities were insta-connected to my trade network thanks to harbors.
So the game went in my favor, not so much because of the UA or UUs, I'm guessing it had more to do with the map itself, and I wonder if that kind of map/start is part of the "start bias" for Carthage?