What are your starting settings?

[Soronery]

Diety
Pangea
Strategic balance
Allow policy saving
Allow promotion saving
No ancient ruins
Quick combat
Random personalities

I don't think I'm ever going to play non strategic balance resources again. No iron in the vicinity is retarded and largely unplayable.

Allow policy saving...dumb change to not allow it. Basically just forces you to not build culture buildings early on/get culture allies.

Allow promotion saving: I don't really save promotions often but I see no reason to force promotion. Sometimes I want to wait and see if I want drill or shock late game.

No ancient runes: Makes the game too random. Early advantages are huge and if you get enough it can snowball into giving you an almost free win basically.

[MadRat]

Ruins not runes; a rune is a drawn/printed character.

[Soronery]

Thanks didn't notice it.

[lordsurya08]

Legendary start. It makes the AI civs get great starting locations, making the game more challenging.

[Rohili]

King/Emperor
Continents
Everything else standard/default

I am a firm believer in playing the game as it was designed to be played. I think choosing other options (e.g. marathon speed, no barbarians, archipelago) distorts and unbalances the game, since the game designers build the game with the standard settings in mind.

[LuCypher73]

Random Personalities

I tend to play a pangea because my computer runs slow on maps bigger than tiny and continents is just weird on anything smaller than small. Epic speed and the eras still dont last long enough but I am not fond of the production times for marathon. I am tempted to shut off ruins but I generally get over it and leave it unchecked.

[MadRat]

King/random/12 civs 12 Cs/standard

Rat

[Abraxis]

Immortal
Small Continents/large
20 civs/20 CS
Epic or my modified Marathon (epic production speeds with marathon research speed)
Wet climate (more rivers/lakes)
3 Billion years old (or four, whatever the youngest is)
sparse resources
Rageing barbarians

Does anyone know if it's possible to modify it so you can have a combination of legendary and sparse? Like, a bunch of resources around capitols to make it a mega city, then sparse everywhere else?

It would make capitols more of the powerhouse they should be.

[Gort]

With the new library/market/circus buildings and the buffs to the Tradition policies, aren't capitals powerful enough without giving them a legendary start as well?

[plesniak]

King
22 civs
28 city states
standard size
epic/marathon
Earth/Pangea/sometimes lakes map also
5 billion yrs
hot
wet
high sea level

The latest leader I played was Pachuti of the Incas, also played Songhai, Ghandi, Ceaser, Catherine and Elizabeth.



I have been having some fun with these settings as I get to see a lot of the leaders and thier expressions and such. The close quarters actually makes for a pretty entertaining game if you can put up with the frequent flow of leaders for various interactions. Sometimes I disable some of the win conditions or pick just one to see how the AI reacts. There is inevitably a lot of wars and ganging up on one another. Koom Bya.

[Zyxpsilon]

Favorites, only -- but i also like some diversity often enough to add fun;

King.. or upwards
Archipelago/Small or Tiny (yep, fast & early inter_activities)
Me + 3 to 4 Majors, mostly 3CS per civs (thus, 12 to 15)
No Ruins (I'll create my own luck, thank you very much)
No Barbarians (for much more Deterministic gameplay)
Disable Start Bias (Justice for all)

Two all new Allows left as is UNCHECKED... i would have given an arm and a leg for Always-Peace & Always-War instead of trying to please the ICS gamers. It's silly, it's not Vanilla intentions, it's a clear cheat ---IMHO.

Time (if i want to be stressed over a strict limit)
ONE Victory condition only (Clear Goal to reach)

*Everything else, mostly standard.

I've got preferences for opponents in specific Victory contexts too, instead of trusting random settings -- at times.

[ClarenceSeedorf]

Askia or Gandhi
7 AI
NO CS
--------
Prince
Duel
Pangea
Standard speed
Strategic Balance
--------
Domination
One City Challenge
Quick Combat

[sucksforyou112]

Usually go random all the way

[zatarra09]

Prince
HUGE
Archipelago
Raging Barbarians
Sometimes changing the world age to 5 billion- but i havent really noticed that affecting much change

[BammBamm]

[Soronery]

What does world age affect?

[pickle]

King/Emperor (in the process of moving up)
Standard/Large
Random map type
standard/epic or marathon with faster production
8-14 civs
all VC
sometimes raging barbs

try to keep it as random as I can while doing anything in particular that I want to play

[shanodin]

Warlord (but keeping on trying prince)
Random size
Random type
Atandard speed
Quick Combat.

For me, the most important thing about setting the game up is to make sure I select quick combat. Since they moved it from the ingame menu, I have to make sure to remember to do it before starting. Not having QC on just really annoys me - the graphics of the fight add nothing to the game but they slow everything down, which gets on my nerves.

[Slynky333]

I am in the process of going down the list and playing every civ in an effort to win with each of them at King level. (of course, after about 10 failures with Victoria, I've moved past her for the moment)

In order to make the game somewhat fair, I play on pangea. Continents and anything requiring the AI to mount a navel attack seems unfair (since they seem reluctant to do it). I used to play on lakes but got irritated at the "ranged" arrow flaking off the map and coming in on the other side. And, besides, with pangea, the navel aspect is not completely removed--it's just not as important as in island/continent (etc.) games.

To give the game some randomness/variety, I set opponents, map size, sea level, temperature, and rainfall to random.

Set to generate new random seed (probably unnecessary).

PS: Along those lines...how hard (seriously) would it be to have the settings remain the same from game-to-game (the last setting you used being saved) so I didn't have to do that all the time?

[Nares]

Continents/Pangaea
Small/Tiny map size - overloaded with civs, makes for some exciting AI-AI power struggles; makes me wish there were better diplo options for me to sit back on while they fight
Quick game pace - makes the slow builds speeds bareable; I tried Marathon once.....I'm sure there's an emote to explain the tedium
3 Billion years - it's all about the riverside hill farms, baby
Disable Diplomatic VC - it's super cheesy
18 Civs and varying amounts of CSs - generally civs are more exciting than CSs; I'll occassionally even disable CSs completely, plus overloading civs crowds CSs out in-general

I've played around with Complete Kills, but the game doesn't seem programmed to support it. Once a civ has been defeated, all their empire information is erased. You end up with bugs like "SoandSo declares war on" while also occassionally receiving ridiculous requests from the "eliminated" AI.

Originally Posted by Soronery

What does world age affect?

Hills/Mountains.

Younger age gets you more rugged terrain. Older has been weathered more by errosion.

Not that that's actually how it works.

Climate controls terrain quality (ie desert/tundra/snow), and rainfall controls tree/jungle placement.