I feel like I'm getting screwed over by the map generator lately, when playing deity on standard maps. Due to the 3 settlers the AI is getting, the space is really cramped in some starts and often (for me) finding an AI city 3-4 fields away from your capital borders means a restart because it's going to be early war rush that I can't do much about.
That's one complaint but what I really wanted to point out is that the map generator just seems to hate me. I'm not ashamed of re-rolling when the start is bad, for a deity game, but the amount of re-rolls I have to do, before I'm satisfied seem to have drastically increased lately, so I'm wondering if something changed in a small update. Here are some weird situation that just seems more normal now:
Some general observations:
- I do an archipelago map - I get a start next to the ocean with poor fields and one single sea resource
- I choose a civ focused on war - I don't get iron (actually, getting iron is ridiculously rare in general)
- I do a civ focused in religion - Not a damn natural wonder in sight
- In general there is much more big desert areas nearby my capitol location than I remember being before
- I choose a civ focused on naval capabilities - Only 3 oil fields on the whole map.
- And so on, and so on.
Anyone experience similar things?
I've worked my way up to playing at immortal level, and never yet dared to play deity. Maybe come Christmastime...?
As for the map, I nowadays favor a "huge" one with continents and islands. The islands really make it so much more interesting later in the game.
You've triggered me by mentioning strategic resource scarcity. Oh my god, I could rant for an hour about this. It can really make a game a drag to play, and so finally, for my current game, I'm trying out a mod that increases all strategic resources by about a third. And the result? With the standard statistician's caveat that n=1, I can report that I've had one of the most miserable experiences yet getting iron, coal, and oil. ONE iron tile and ONE coal tile were within reach, and ZERO oil ANYWHERE. Playing Hammurabi, I look north to China, covering about the same amount of territory, with SEVEN oil tiles. It really pisses me off. Don't anyone tell me that you can trade for oil, because in my experience the AI won't part with a meaningful quantity of any resources until it's nearly obsolete. In fact, it's the Atomic Age now, and China has developed none of its oil tiles. That pisses me off more.
Yeah, iron is absurdly rare compared to real life. Currently I'm still stuck with one iron tile for 15 cities, but since it has become obsolete it doesn't matter much anymore. Also I never really found a good resolution for the coal shortage. I got luck with oil, though. I sent units out to sea and found, in the fog, gobs of oil in a few uninhabited hellholes, and now am the chief oil exporter to the world. Usually it doesn't work out that way. I'm even building oil plants instead of coal plants, which I've never done before.
Overall I'd say iron is the worst early-game problem, and aluminum the worst late-game one. I seem to get the shaft disproportionately more often with resources compared to the AI. It's fair to say that almost every decision I make to go to war is motivated by strategic resource scarcity. Okay, that's maybe true to life for the pre-modern eras, but it's not normal after that. In modern times nations almost always go to war for purely nationalistic reasons, nationalism being a mind virus with a life of its own. Religion, language and culture are all ingredients in the nationalist brew.
Whoops, getting off track here...
Anyway, I do sympathize with your plight. We may both be falling prey to problems of perception, or statistical fluctuations which in the long run average out, but it does feel often like the map generator is conspiring against me. I almost quit my current game, things seemed so bad, but I'm glad I stuck it out, because I've clawed my way to the top of the score board.
What I don't much like is the way the human player seems to be held to a higher standard than the AI ones. Dido can knock off one city-state after another and nothing is done about it, but I take one of Gilgamesh's cities when he declares a surprise war on me, and he goes crying to the world congress and gets Kongo and the Maori to come to his rescue. On the other hand, Oberinspektor Derrick was right when he said in another thread that the AI is an absolute idiot in all things tactical, and all I had to do was sit in my cities and pick off enemy units as they trickled in one or two at a time, trying to breach my walls with swordsmen, or attack my fortified men-at-arms from across a river.
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