Is there anything you can do to help get that 2nd settler at the beginning?

I skip the math and just found another city, ha. But a NONE settler is pretty alluring, especially since it always will take up some food. I might try that in my next two-settler game. I usually play as my favorite civilization, the Russians, and they often get that second settler bonus.

About the fast settlers, I'm not a big fan of them. I feel guilty when I can build irrigation in one turn anywhere, and if I do use them, I just plan to play a laid back game where I might try something completely weird.

Depends on playing style. Emperor w/ Chariot rush? Two cities for sure. Chieftain w/ empire building? Infrastructure, most likely, especially if fast. But my personal favorite: using the 2nd Settler to conquer nearby spawned level 2 cities.

The second settler is probably my favorite. Once I wrote an autohotkey script to just keep making games under specified settings until it renders a start with a second settler. This avoids the messy fact that adding it yourself is rather more unscrupulous, since the game does not assign them randomly, but according to the quality of your start. Whenever the bot finds two settlers, it minimizes civ and fires up a new instance of dosbox to look for more, to give me a selection of starts to choose from. If there's any interest I can post the script, but it's really simple since it just does keypresses and pixel color evaluation.


One thing I noticed is that second settlers are common on 5-billion year custom worlds and rare on 3. Probably something to do with the abundance of flat land in the 3.

As said before by other posts, Russians, no doubt. But I'd rather start with one settler in a good starting position than with two in an isolated island. Keeping a good balance between knowledge and money production is important to me, since I dislike playing blitz games, and caravans are essential for that purpose.
Once thing I never understood about how the computer measures how good your starting location is is the ammount of neighbours you have: the more, the better. Easier to finish them of at early stages of the game, specially when not playing Emperor.
So give me a good big continent, a couple or three other civilizations in the neighbourhood, and you'll make me happy.
By the way, does anyone know of an editing program in which you could change the difficulty level when on play? Thanks in advance!

jordissim said:

I'd rather start with one settler in a good starting position than with two in an isolated island.

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That's very unlikely as the presence of two Settlers indicates neighbors.

Okay, just did a quick test on some of the thoughts mentioned here. Started as Russians with following settings: Chieftan, Large, Temperate, Normal, 5 billion years. Chose the Russians. Started with only irrigation, mining, roads, and 50 shields, and one settler. My starting location wasn't the greatest either:



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My first thought was that maybe I had lots of room, but no, I had two very close neighbors (used the Shift+56 cheat to reveal the map) as you can see from this screenshot (note the location in the minimap, same continent and close). Also, a third neighbor is also on this continent another screen away.



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Only thing now is maybe for some reason the computer thinks I have an amazing starting point...

Mize said:

You can get a second settler with any civ if you are in a relatively weak position.

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Playing Earth as Aztec, with 200+ restarts (creating save games with different starting techs/resource tiles/huts), I have not once seen a second settler. This is on Chieftain through King difficulties.

Ted, this is because the Aztecs on Earth have it easy, there's a lot of land in the Americas and only one potential rival, Abe Lincoln, and that only if the Chinese are not in Asia. And even if the Americans are there, I think they still would be seeded after you (light blue being the second-to-last colour), so the advantage will be for them...