A thought about start biases on Deity

I posted this on /r/civ a little while ago and it didn't get much discussion. I'm curious to know if there are others who agree with me.

TL;DR: Are start biases that put you on the edge of the map useful on Deity?

So yesterday I had a very frustrating game. I was playing as Germany, on Pangea. My starting location was in the middle, and I had 4 close neighbours. My start was a mixed bag, I stole 2 workers from Babylon, one from a CS and found one in a barb camp. However, my luxuries were calendar and trapping based, so that made the start a bit slow.
As Germany, I was pretty happy with my barb recruiting, I had 3 archers and 4 warriors by about turn 60-70 epic game pace (can't remember the exact turn, but I had just settled my second city, capital was at 4 pop).
Anyway, none of this helped when I got DoWed by the Netherlands, and an absolute sea of comp bows, spearmen and couple of swordsmen made short work of my capital. Maybe with mining luxuries I would have had a better start and got early comp bows, but as I said I need calendar and trapping.
Now I know what you might be thinking, couldn't you have bribed him to attack someone else? Here's the problem, I'd already spent my lux and gold dissuading the Ottomans from attacking after they turned up with a great general on my borders! So I had really no resources left to bribe the Netherlands. I felt utterly powerless, like my first ever game on deity.

So after that game I spent some time thinking about why I was so screwed, and I realised that when you are in the middle of a Pangea, with 4 neighbours (North, South, East, West), there is a much higher chance of this happening. When I think back to the other games I'd played recently, they were all with civs that were on the coast (Portugal, England, Ottomans) and so free of neighbours on one side, or close to tundra (Russia, Sweden), which tends to put you on the edge of the map. This is actually really useful, as it's much easier to keep 1 or 2 neighbours happy than 3 or 4!

I think this also makes life much easier for a domination victory as it means you can start war on one front, without worrying about another one opening up behind you. Much easier to snowball pushing in one direction without having to defend the other flank at the same time.

So, perhaps this is something to think about when evaluating the usefulness of civs on Deity. There already other reasons to like coastal starts (better trade routes), and it's probably my favourite start bias. Tundra starts can obviously be poor terrain, but on epic pace you can afford to move a few turns without hurting the game too much.
So, this experience has made be value coastal starts much more! In addition, I think it reveals a hidden advantage to the tundra start that can offset some of the disadvantages.

Captain_Wozzeck said:

Are start biases that put you on the edge of the map useful on Deity?

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Now that you point it out, I must agree!

Once criticism I raised on consentient's tier list thread was that he was not consistent with giving a point (or not) for Desert start bias. But then I would argue that coastal and forest start bias are worth something too. Tundra being on the edge is another reason why it is just as good as a grassland bias.

Acording to Wikia Starting Bias, about a third of civs have coastal or tundra bias.

For the sake of simplicity, let's assume an oval Pangaea, divided into a 4x4 grid, so 16 starting locations for 8 civs. 12/16 or 75% of the spots are coastal. Dividing into a 5x5 grid (close to the number for 8 civs + 16 CS) is 16/25 or still about two-thirds coastal. So this implies to me that, for the vast majority of games, coastal bias should be honored. This idea should also work for the all-land great plains type maps. Most civs are near an edge or corner.

But that also seems to imply that relatively few Civs are stuck in the middle. That does not seem correct. So maybe I am thinking about this wrong?

I think your back-of-the-envelope is about right

As an example, in my last Pangaea game, 5 out of 8 civs started on the coast. Of those, 4 had 2 immediate neighbours and one had 3 neighbours.

Of the 3 civs in the middle, one was protected by city states on one side and had 2 neighbours, but the other two were in the unlucky situation I described, 4 neighbours - North, South, East and West.

So I think you are right in that being stuck in the middle is rare, but for me it's still highly desirable to avoid. I've always liked strong coastal starts anyway, because naval warfare is great way to gain advantage over the AI, and cargo ships are great. Perhaps if the AI was good at naval warfare, we wouldn't be talking about the coast as the safe "edge of the map"! After all it should be invade-able just like land, it's just that the AI rarely manages it.

Captain_Wozzeck said:

So I think you are right in that being stuck in the middle is rare...

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Without the coastal bias on an oval Pangaea, or any civ on a great-plains type map, my back-of-the-envelope guess puts the odds at between 25% and 33%. So not exactly “rare”.

...but for me it's still highly desirable to avoid.

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I was not clear, but I agree with you completely! I think you are on to something that starting-in-the-center has not been sufficiently explored as the main distinguishing feature of tougher Deity maps. The discussion always focuses on your immediate neighbor being a warmonger or coastal trade routes being OP. I think your observation about the potential for being dog-piled on four fronts would overwhelm either of those two considerations!

But most games are not ovals or great-plains. The usual patterns with Pangaea or Fractal or Continents means that it will be rare for any civ to be in the middle of four others. So I think only playing civs with a coastal bias, so as to avoid starting-in-the-center, is probably being overly cautious. But worth considering for sure with oval Pangaea (or donut where the middle is not mountains or water).

Nice to know someone agrees then

One of the reasons I like fractal rather than Pangaea for domination is because it's easier to have defensive positioning, so you can war away without worrying too much about defense. There are more choke-points, but this can be positive as well as negative.

You're probably right in that this aspect of start bias is probably only something to really take into account when choosing civs for very open maps like oval or a 3 million year old Pangaea, and I certainly wouldn't avoid a strong civ because of it

Interesting thought. I have to agree! But this possibility is also part of the reason that I don't enjoy Pangaea maps as much.

I never even thought of this as a possible benefit to tundra starts. Another is that it seems to me like tundra starts are more likely to have salt nearby.