Coastal start issues redux

I think I've posted a thread about coastal starts before... my apologies if so.

I spend a lot of time thinking about coastal starts and why they are frequently not as good as they should be and I just realized an obvious kink maybe?

I play on straight Continents standard size so there's obviously an (average) limit of available good coast starts on any map. Meanwhile, a larger-than-accomidatable proportion of Civs are Naval-based. So there are gaps.

We know Venice has priority favoring or whatever but I get bad starts (no coastal resources, or "ocean-lake") with Venice a lot. And in my last game as England, I got a great start! - but AI Ottomans and Indonesia were both founded inland on my continent, poor guys.

Which is when it hit me. Every time I choose to play as a naval Civ, I'm only reducing the randomly seeded naval players by 1/8th (now it is a third (or whatever) of 7 civs instead of a third of 8 - basically still 3 or so) and adding 1. I am increasing the amount of naval players by 7/8ths of an 8th or something.

This is why my choice of a Naval civ is partly self-defeating - because I have increased competition! This is why I end up frustrated trying to get the most out of Naval civs - I'm crowding the proverbial boat!

Obviously there is a ton of luck in the draw and I can end up the only naval civ, or choose a land civ and have 7 naval AIs. I understand probability. But my frustration is with the trend. The trend is that I am 7/8ths over-seeding Naval civs when I want to have a good coast start.

Unless someone knows of a thing in the game that compensates for that by limiting seeded naval AIs? Anyway that was my revelation.

 

I had some similar thoughts on coastal starts and naval games. What I ended up doing was making myself a couple custom maps in the World Builder to play on and ensuring all the coastal Start Position were a fine slice of coast. Give the AI optimal conditions and equitable resources.

That does help to make things nice for a Grudge Match of the Naval Civs. Downside of course being you know where everything on the map you built is. Still, it gives everyone a nice petri dish to grow in and see what they can do in optimal conditions.

 

Now something we need to make sure we understand & verify with source code before we go on with the topic...

How exactly does start bias and start resources work?

2 main possibilities I can think of:

#1 resources are placed on the map first, and then the civs are placed according to their start bias

#2 Civs are placed on the map first, and then a number of luxury + bonus resources are put next to the civ's starting location.

Obviously these 2 (if not more possibilities) would drastically change the way we look at "competition" for start locations