To be frank: Then make sure you have a river when you settle.
To be frank: that's poor balance. Rivers are already really good. You can't irrigate without them, they give a commerce bonus, allow Watermills and the Deruptus Brewing House. You already want a river at least near by, if not settled on. Making it so you *have* to settle on the river makes the game more boring.
Several things made RifE appeal to me: For one thing, Rivers aren't as necessary as they are in vanilla civ, or even as much as they are in regular FfH. Partially because you could build any improvements without needing a resource or a worker tech (with worker techs still being desirable due to a 75% reduction in build time), and because improvement yields were higher. It was easier to get plenty of food to grow your city even without tons of farms, allowing you to focus on commerce, production, or specialists more.
So, in the new version, improvement yields are reduced, worker techs are now required (much more boring - before worker techs were helpful, but you didn't have to grab all of them in the early game if you only needed to build, say, 1 plantation to hook up a needed resource... now we're back to vanilla civ's paradigm of grabbing a bunch of worker techs relatively early in the game), most improvements can only be built on resources, and oh... if the need for irrigation due to that stuff wasn't enough to already make a no-fresh-water start into a quit-restart, now you are pratically hardcoded
required to settle on a river. Plus, even if you do that, your cities are now capped at a much smaller size than before because cities could grow "too big" before.
I recognize that much of that stuff comes from FF, and is still available in FF, but RifE also has some pretty cool innovations either implemented or in the works that I was really excited about, but I'm not going to ever see most of it if the game isn't fun anymore. While I can change the unhealth problem, there's no way for me to get back the way improvements worked, and changing the unhealth for myself puts me out of sync with everyone else playing RifE.
Yeah, that's pretty whiny, I know. I apologize for that. And yes, I still appreciate all your hard work, I just think that some of the new balancing stuff is off-target. I'm also confused because from the last version, it looked like RifE was *supposed* to be headed towards easier growth and more diverse options than base FfH, and now through a complete 180 in design philosophy, it's becoming the opposite.