Worst Starts Thread

Windsor said:

Commerce is actually the only thing he do have a bit of with two furs.

Chopping settlers makes a lot more sense. Being Persia he's also either CHA/IMP or FIN/ORG. So that's faster settlers or more commerce and cheaper maintenance.

+3 isn't that amazing and without stone or IND pyramids takes so many chops to get. Scientists are tile-efficient, but not actually pop-efficient. And it's not like that city is strong enough to carry the game, so after pyramids, then what? You'll have no production left!

Click to expand...

Exactly I'd much rather chop settlers with all those trees.

Yeah, I completely agree with Windsor, also, it is Darius, the economical powerhouse with no trait synergy for this.

It looks like a complete pain. Mining + BW takes forever to research, but has to be done. I'd guess it is not worth growing the capital before building the first settler. The only synergy here is that you can use the first worker to boost the one-tile you work (camp) when building the second one (or that would be my approach, I think). I was a bit surprised to see that the start generator would allow this, but I do have iStartingLocPercent 10, so I don't always get the best starts (vs AIs).

You can also see some tundra terrain in the south.. I'll play this one later when I want a rougher game. The modded difficulty isn't high though, it's a Noble/Deity hybrid, Noble AI bonuses with many non-AI settings set to Deity.

Definitely a strange start, but this the path I would take

1) Research mining -> BW while building worker
2) Improve furs while finishing BW
3) Chop out settler/worker/settler while researching Wheel/pottery
4) Set up cottages in the capital while one of the other cities that actually has food becomes worker/settler pump

That being said, I don't necessarily know the surrounding area. As long as there's some food somewhere around here or further green river tiles, it's definitely playable. It's by no means easy, though.

For some reason print screen is giving me what is on my desktop instead of what is currently happening in civ 4, so I have no images, but I have regenerated 3 times in a row on the Great plains without nay food! First time, I had marble and iron (used WB to see iron, and both resources are on plains tiles, lol) in the top right corner, second time I had 1 flood plains and a hidden grass horse in upper-middle, which I guess is better than a dry rice, but still, and the third time I had only 1 oasis tiles, ALL OTHER TILES plains for that one! Oh, I'm sure I'm going to make a lot of use of those plains hills with my my one oasis tile, thanks mapscript. That last one was in very center of map.

EDIT: It ctually happened a 4th time in a row, this time at least with grassland (and 1 forested fur and 1 hidden iron). So I decided to check what the AI's got, and the guy in the top right corner got 3 pigs (one on a grassland hill) 1 wet (lake) corn and a grassland-forest deer. He also had iron, coal and fur (fur was on grassland forest). WTF game!

EDIT 2: Lol, broke the streak! Dry plains wheat, mostly just plains tiles, no hidden start resources at all... to think that has been my BEST spawn out of 5 spawns! This game would have been playable too, because 2 ai's had no food, one had only 1 cow (grassland) and one had only 1 clam. This mapscript is so screwy! If you end up loaded with food, you're probably WAY ahead of the AI.

This save/map is quite hard. It's a small pangaea with standard number of AI's. I have it set to marathon deity, sorry those who don't like marathon. I know I've scenario'd immortal university games as marathon instead of normal, so I assume it can be done here (?).
Spoiler for more info on start:


Spoiler for more on map:

Worldbuildered some increased visibility. Willem and Hannibal are just to the north of the tundra. They'll fight one another and leave Joao in the far north to expand like crazy.

P.S. If you scout the right way, you can find the single other source of seafood on the coast . . .

I just got one of the iciest, most hopeless starts I've ever had. Barely any tundra, just ice.



I play on a weird custom mashup of mods (50 civ slots, Marathon accelerated, K-mod, buffed castles), so I don't have a save for you. This was on the full-of-resources map script with twice the normal amount of health and luxury resources. Is this start winnable on Immortal?

Funny that my next "Regenerate map" produced an even worse start. Starting to wonder whether my buddy rigged the script...