Custom map start locations

[Vizkan]

I made a custom map, but when I went to play on it all the civs and city states spawned in the same place. How can I fix it?

 

[LeeS]

Did you assign starting locations either (a) for specific civs and city-states to start in specific locations, or (b) for civs and city states to be randomly distributed to specific player starting locations?

If so, did you use the 'load scenario' button under Map Type after you selected the map, and did you then click the 'Start Scenario' button in the lower right of the Modded Game Set-up menu?

And did you go through the MODS menus to get to a game set-up menu?

If you answered no to any of these questions, then the following applies:

• Since the game is not creating a new map but must use the existing map you told it to use, it cannot generate 'sweet spots' for every player to have a fair starting location
• Since it cannot create these sweet spots then all players are being directed to the only 'sweet spot(s)' it can find on the map. Or more correctly, the sweetest spot on the map gets selected for everybody or nearly everybody.
• If you assigned player starting locations in the map but did not go through all required steps to load a pre-made map as a scenario (MODS menu, NEXT, SINGLE PLAYER, Set-Up Game, Select the Map, Click 'load scenario', START SCENARIO) then the game ignores those pre-assigned starting locations and merely looks for the best or only sweet spot on the map

I had this happen to me a couple of times when I was playing around with pre-made scenario maps and forgot to follow through on one of the required steps. It is kinda funny to find everybody all starting in the same place in a Oops kind of a way.

 

[Vizkan]

I haven't assigned any starting locations - I want to have the game decide from any tile on the map for where players spawn. Is that possible, or do I have to go through and manually set spots to be possible starting locations?

 

[LeeS]

You'll either have to set assigned starting locations which also requires you to pick at least the major civs that are going to be in the game directly in the map Edit Scenario (or Scenario) tab of Worldbuilder. I'm typing from memory so can't remember the exact designation of the various tabs within worldbuilder.

Otherwise you would have to make sure there are as many fertile areas on the map as there are ever going to be players, including CS players. Even then that won't I think be a guarantee there will be no 2+ players wanting to start in the same position issues.

Long-short is that WorldBuilder isn't as friendly as it could be for this sort of thing. It is much more a scenario-creation tool than it is a custom-map-with-random-start-posititions sort of tool.

And for determining fertile 'sweet spots', the game takes into account not only food-bearing tiles, but also strategic and luxury resources, as well as I think river tiles and grasslands and flood plains. Each of these different plots is assigned a 'fertility value' even though the tile in question may be a hill with a strategic resource. 'Fertility' in the sense the game uses for this calculation is really about how much value the tile has toward allowing a player to grow and become more advanced and more powerful, rather than directly a calculation of only food-yields.