New Middle East map

[much2much]

I just downloaded 1.96 today and decided to try this map. First game I started as Minos who have a city on a two tile island and the other tile is a plains tile. There are NO EARLY RESOURCES in the fat cross though. Even with Agriculture and Animal Husbandry nothing showed up. I settled a second city in the north west corner of the map, which has fruit. Then I tryed to take Mycenae which I narrowly missed out on and gave up. Then I tried the map again this time with the Sarmations. I was able to do very well (this is on Prince) and was narrowly the score leader at 90 turns to the finish on Epic.

The problems I had were that when I conquered a whole bunch of other civs they were useless. Hammurabi was score leader for a while and then I went and took Babylon and its surrounds were COMPLETELY UNDEVELOPED?! WTF is this? I ended up taking Mycenae and it was population 2. This was in 331 AD! A whole bunch of other civs were also useless like this too. It appears to me that the Civ AI can't handle not having a food resource in the cities radius. Mycenae for instance only has horse and I think the AI just keeps working this and not trying to grow.

[Kidinnu]

If this is the normal map with really dense civs, (i.e. Medes and Persians start in sight of each other's capitals) yeah, it's a lot more densely packed than Civ is really designed for, I think, and there are several civilizations that are really unbalanced - some strong, some weak. If I recall correctly, the mapmaker said he liked diplomatic games; it's an interesting idea, but I don't think it's a really successful scenario.