This thread pretty much embodies the ridiculous nature these criticisms against Civilization V have taken. I was playing on the Earth map for my first game, and I honestly never even thought about the things you guys are coming up in here. Why would anyone even think that the purpose of the Earth map had anything to do with putting the civilizations in the places they are located? I mean, how exactly would Washington and Hiawatha ever reconcile their differences? The Iroquois Confederacy is basically eastern New York geographically, after all, and, with the size of the cities, the best we'd see is Washington, and right next to it the capital of the Iroquois. And, what about Africa? The Songhai would get a pretty nice advantage with all that land and no other African civilization in the game to challenge them, after all. What good would the player start locations have on the actual gameplay, anyways? It's not like the players nor the AI would be plotting the cities after the capital anywhere remotely near their actual locations, after all. What about Australia, too? Or South America. Or Canada. Or Madagascar. Or the West Indies. The only reason people would want the player start locations to be the way they are in real life would be for realism, but, clearly, doing so would, right after the first city, provide a clear drift from realism, with some civilizations having the advantage of uninhabited land, whereas some civilizations, namely the European civilizations, would be at a clear disadvantage for obvious reasons.
Now, let me be clear. I am all for criticisms. The free market is, after all, built on competition. I was one of the first people to defend everyone the right of everyone who was outraged about the demo's release date to be outraged, but I also have the right to point out how obnoxious and illogical those criticisms are, such as the ones here. I'm all for holding Sid Meiers over the fire, so that he or his team keeps producing good quality in works, but, when a criticism becomes something like this, then I frankly just think you're all just making complaints for complaint's sake. If the game developers never intended to add realistic start locations, and, if those realistic start locations would be illogical in application and destroy the game's balance, then it's not right to criticize the makers over something like that. If you guys want a game like the one described on an earth map, then wait awhile for a mod or scenario specifically for that purpose, but you can't criticize the game developers for not including such a thing, because, not only was it never intended, none of the game developers probably ever thought that something like this would even be a problem, because, at the least, you guys have to acknowledge how unbalanced the game would be in such a case. It would also be rather unrealistic to imagine that only Hiawatha or Washington would primarily occupy the Americas, which couldn't be reached until the Industrial Age by every other civilization until such time has occurred.
