Between the colossal size of the big fat hex and the half food specialist policy it takes a really monsterous city before the weaker half of the tiles around your city come into play. On top of that, the only worthlessly bad tiles are flat deserts and tundra, outside of those the utility of the tiles is pretty similar. You could start out with very very few special resources, but a lot of variety in that department is pretty unlikely. To me there just doesn't seem to be a lot of room to really call any start particularly bad, certainly not like you could in previous civs where you were so dependent on bonus food resources to make other tiles viable.
The one possible caveat to that is rivers. They're excessively powerful in 5. It's not that I would call any start without a river bad, but when compared to a start with a river it kind of is. I would say the huge time gap between civil service and fertilizer is the big culprit, but the 1 gold/tile and triggering the golden age bonus is more powerful than it was in any previous civ too.
The one
