Predetermined City Sites

[gja102]

I'm not an experienced modder but I used the editor to fix the ICS issue in Civ 3. On an existing world map, I changed a terrain type to 'City Site', made it the only terrain that could support cities, and then dotted them around the map at the appropriate places.

This had a number of cool benefits - as well as fixing ICS, it meant the AI would always build cities in the 'right' locations - you always got a correctly-placed Rome, a London, and a city serving perfectly as the Suez canal (rather than one tile off like the AI is wont to do). It also meant that Europe could support more cities and civs then the historically less-developed continents (and places like the Sahara stayed empty).

However I couldn't find a way of using this custom map in a fully randomised scenario - the civs always ended up starting on exactly the same 'City Site' tiles. Any way to truly randomise the start locations on a custom map?

 

[timerover51]

There is one mod, if I remember correctly, of a Whole World map, where the starting locations were restricted to Marsh, with the Causes Disease box unchecked. There will likely always be plenty of Marsh on normal and wet maps, but the RNG results do tend to cluster marsh tiles together. Also, that does mean that ALL of the Marsh tiles no longer cause disease, not just the ones with cities on them.

Then the new Lord of the Rings mod is going to restrict cities to Hills, again which there is always plenty on the map. That way, you just have to use the "Redistribute Starting Locations" feature under Map in the Editor tool bar to reset all of your starting locations.

That is about the only way that I think you would be able to do what you want with a custom map without changing the map.