Does starting location matter as much in Civ VII? I get so much desert every time I restart

[Oddible]

I'm wondering how critical start location is if there is a lot of desert? I've restarted about 50x as Xerxes and I always seem to be dumped in the middle of the desert. There is always a river but not always any production (hills/forests). Can I get away with these starts? It seems that for certain leaders or empires that the game tries to give a historically aligned start location.

 

[Siptah]

Starting location terrain is indeed defined by leader and civ choice. Almost all starts are viable though.

 

[uppi]

Almost all starts are viable though.

I am not sure I agree with that. Some starts get you considerably slower out of the gate than others. And in the early game that can really matter a lot.

 

[Lord Lakely]

Navigable rivers are bad, the rest is okay. terrain type doesn't really matter that much anymore - warehouse buildings ensure you always have good yields. Tundra and Desert aren't much worse than plains or grassland.

features otoh are very important because they determine what improvements you're getting. but I find that those are fairly well balanced too. It's rare to have a settlement with little food, and only settlements on coast suffer in production.

 

[Siptah]

I am not sure I agree with that. Some starts get you considerably slower out of the gate than others. And in the early game that can really matter a lot.

Yes, there are still better and worse starts, but I think that having to restart because of terrain is really rare.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I am not sure I agree with that. Some starts get you considerably slower out of the gate than others. And in the early game that can really matter a lot.

This depends more on resources than on terrain.

Navigable rivers are bad, the rest is okay

Questionable. Navigable rives provide access to ocean and many related tile improvements for inland settlements. Not to mention the ability to unlock and use additional Songhai treasure convoys.

Although, sure, if you place settlements in a wrong way, navigable rivers will break settlement connection, unless you build bridges or connect settlements by water.

 

[Lord Lakely]

Although, sure, if you place settlements in a wrong way, navigable rivers will break settlement connection, unless you build bridges or connect settlements by water.

I really dislike them though. Buildings and quarters are so important in the capital, and with resources being a permanent fixture, you can easily get boxed in with a navigable river start.

They're okay for your other settlements, but for a capital? not a fan. Mountains are less bad because those at least provide useful adjacencies to Culture buildings.

 

[stealth_nsk]

I really dislike them though. Buildings and quarters are so important in the capital, and with resources being a permanent fixture, you can easily get boxed in with a navigable river start.

They're okay for your other settlements, but for a capital? not a fan. Mountains are less bad because those at least provide useful adjacencies to Culture buildings.

But if you build any water building (i.e. Fishing Quay) on the river, it creates a district, so you could continue building on the other side of the river. How it makes you boxed?

 

[UWHabs]

I've had cases where the navigable river takes up too many tiles of the capital, and sometimes you get a bad layout of resources or mountains that means it's not as simple to expand to the other side.

But given my capital is generally never going to lose a tile to another settlement, and has the full tile set to work with, even in the worst case if you have a bad river spot, too much water, etc.. maybe I have to skip a warehouse building, or don't have the full free space to get all the wonders in. And when you get later, those nav rivers can make for some juicy markets/inns to help you along too.

For me the "bad" capitals are where you get either a bad resource set, they're too far that you have to build out too much to get to them, or they're just laid out in an annoying way that I have to waste a lot of tiles. Those are the times where I might aim for a restart. But desert is usually good because camels.

 

[Kenshiro70]

There's an interesting video, "What's going on with CIv VII's Balance?" that discusses this (linked below at the point where that discussion beings). TL;DR, resource yields are normalized across all types, so it's hard to get a super bad starting location, but it also removes most of the high-risk, high reward scenarios as well.

The "Terrain rainbow" is a little strange too (IIRC Tundra, desert, plains, grassland, tropical). I'm on the fence about it - on one hand it's nice to have a little predictability in the early game when you're exploring, but you can also get locked out of a terrain (and its Wonders) based on the other civs' location. I guess that's why they changed Pyramids and Ha'amonga 'a Maui so that they can be built almost anywhere. Thank goodness - I had FOMO just thinking about it!

Apparently Firaxis is doing more work on map generation, so it will be interesting to see if the Terrain Rainbow survives that. I guess if you can build Wonders anywhere and the yields are the same, it doesn't really matter, but we'll see.

 

[UWHabs]

Hopefully the next round of map generation will make the biomes a little more flexible, so you're not as strict as to what order they appear in on the map. Opening up the wonders that aren't too specific to a biome helps too.

You can get some starts that are stronger than others, for sure. Especially for culture, the difference between starting in mountains or with a natural wonder, vs starting in vast open land, can be quite massive. But unless if you ONLY have flat tiles, without any vegetation, rough, or wet tiles, you're bound to at least be able to get some production out of anything.