Starting in the Tundra

Tends to happen a lot to me on Terra maps.

Is there any hope? You often start in an awful position, with no decent land nearby to expand into and nobody close enough to rush? No decent resources except deer and occasionally silver... Is it even possible to do well with such a bad start? Any advice would be appreciated !

I've played one Terra map so far, and started at the southern end of the continent. I only was able to build 5 cities before running out of room, and decided not to do an early war (I probably should have, to get more room). Not all of the cities were in good locations, either!

That said, a couple of good research cities and decent production cities were enough to keep me in the game tech-wise, and after I used a couple of GS to bulb Astronomy I was able to start to exploit the new world first. Over time, I started to expand and had the game in hand when I stopped playing it.

That was at Monarch, so it is doable up to that point. I'm sure better players can handle it on higher difficulty levels, but it is a tougher than many games.

Well, in my last game, Napoleon and Tokugawa started on a few tundra tiles, mostly forests and hills, and around those tiles was ice, ice, and more ice. They really only had room for 3 cramped cities each. I didn't know such starts were even possible. However, they weren't attacked once, even though they were way behind in the tech race, had only a very, very small army (in comparison to the rest), and were for the most of the game Confucianists, while 75% of the world was Judaistic. And Augustus bordered them (on normal land), and you'd expect Augustus to go to war. But no, not many wars were fought, but I had hand picked each AI:

Augustus Caesar, Tokugawa, Joao II, Boudica, Saladin, Sitting Bull, Montezuma, Isabella, Mao Zedong, Napoleon, Mansa Musa, Ragnar, Charlemagne, Hannibal, Hammurabi, Gilgamesh, Genghis Khan, Catherine, Gandhi, and perhaps some more...

It was a strange game, and completely off topic too...

Yea I recently REXed Toku into having 2 cities that weren't 100% tundra/ice and he surprisingly didn't attack me all game. I had few casualties with my riffle/cannon army into his longbows, but only kept one city for a Monarch difficulty civ at around 1200AD .

I always reroll if I am in a tundra start, I am not that good yet to beat those.

In my last game (monarch/epic) I started in the southern tundra as Zara Yaqob. I had some furs for commerce and deer for food, but was not coastal. Rex monster Joao started close to the north and would box me in completely. I only had room for 2 other cities: the first was just to the west, with more than half of the tiles being tundra, but having a horse resource. The second was a useless ice city to the SW with 1 silver and 2 ice hills plus a couple of coast. Nonetheless, this was a very easy win. Also on the continent were Charlemage, Boudica, and HC. I used the furs to get to HBR fast and built a bunch of HAs. Joao had iron hooked up and had a ton of cities, but I took him out easily, pillaging his iron on the first turn of the war and preventing him from hooking others up.

So, no, it's rarely hopeless, and as Gandalf said, "Not even the wise can see all ends".

three cheers for the gandalf quote <3 that jolly good fellow

off topic, but i convinced my gf to read TLOTR two days ago, i'm psyched, but i had to compromise by reading the twilight books :-\

Twilight books actually aren't bad, bro. My ex got me into it with the movies and the books are much better... you won't want to open a vein at least.

Better get some GPP off the seafood. This area tends to have iron so you can probably pull an attack before you fall too far behind in tech, also.

jayjackson said:

Twilight books actually aren't bad, bro.

Click to expand...

Quoting for sheer hilarity