First see your start location, then choose?

[qadams]

Thinking outside the box here — what are the pros and cons of an admittedly radical idea, that you first would see your start location, and then choose which Civ and Leader you will play as?

Is this even possible? Would game coding ever allow a map to be generated first, and a start location identified, before the Civ/Leader is selected?

Given the two exciting new Civs announced today, I really would love an option to first see where I'll start and then decide if I want to be, let's say, Indonesia or Russia or Kongo, etc... wouldn't that be awesome?

 

[Guandao]

Thinking outside the box here — what are the pros and cons of an admittedly radical idea, that you first would see your start location, and then choose which Civ and Leader you will play as?

Is this even possible? Would game coding ever allow a map to be generated first, and a start location identified, before the Civ/Leader is selected?

Given the two exciting new Civs announced today, I really would love an option to first see where I'll start and then decide if I want to be, let's say, Indonesia or Russia or Kongo, etc... wouldn't that be awesome?

Didn't Beyond Earth have something similar to that?

 

[blackbutterfly]

AFAIK this isn't possible RN cos the map generates from a script after the setup phase where you choose a civ.

(With World Builder maps this is a little moot cos they're static and often have starts fixed).

 

[qadams]

Didn't Beyond Earth have something similar to that?

I don't know, I've never played BE.

 

[Haggbart]

Didn't Beyond Earth have something similar to that?

Not really, however you could chose starting location from a map selection. But not before chosing civ.

 

[Cerilis]

Not really, however you could chose starting location from a map selection. But not before chosing civ.

Not that it really mattered in BE. D:

 

[Amrunril]

Beyond Earth was the complete opposite, really. Not only did you have to choose your civ, you had to make several additional setup choices (colonist type, equipment) all before seeing your starting location. It made sense thematically, but you lost a lot of potential to customize your strategy to the map.

As for the original idea, I can definitely see the appeal. On the other hand, if you always have the best civ for the terrain, you don't fully appreciate the times you do get a perfect match, and you're less likely to experience what less common terrain types are like for civs that don't specialize in them.

 

[Scrum Lord]

Once you run the map script, your civ/leader choice is already locked-in. The map script even uses player civs to decide which player gets which spot; Scythia, for example, tends to start near horses, while Egypt has a bias towards floodplains.

 

[blackbutterfly]

The map script even uses player civs to decide which player gets which spot; Scythia, for example, tends to start near horses, while Egypt has a bias towards floodplains.

Yeah, the script will choose a good location for the civ you pick, probably better than you can

 

[UWHabs]

Yeah, the script will choose a good location for the civ you pick, probably better than you can

Yes and no. While it tries its best, every now and then you get a start that would just be a "OMG if only I was XXX on this map..." type of start. Even something as simple as having a few mountains nearby, or being on a lake or a river, might lead better to another civ than the one I chose.

 

[Scrum Lord]

It would have been interesting if Firaxis had allowed map scripts to take a first pass at starting spots, then randomly assign civs & leaders to players based on what starting spots are available. Or ask you which one of X, Y Z civs do you want to be based on the generated map. This is sort-of what the OP asked for, except that instead of seeing a starting spot you would first see a list of recommended civs. The only drawback would be the script spoiling you about who your opponents would be and what kind of terrain might be on the map.

 

[UWHabs]

It would have been interesting if Firaxis had allowed map scripts to take a first pass at starting spots, then randomly assign civs & leaders to players based on what starting spots are available. Or ask you which one of X, Y Z civs do you want to be based on the generated map. This is sort-of what the OP asked for, except that instead of seeing a starting spot you would first see a list of recommended civs. The only drawback would be the script spoiling you about who your opponents would be and what kind of terrain might be on the map.

Well, I would treat anything like this as obviously an optional setting. So when I play, sometimes I might even choose which civs I'm facing, so it's not like me loading up the game on turn 1 and not being able to switch to Monty because he's already in the game is really a huge shock to me.

But would certainly be cool to be able to start a game and then swap out to another civ before settling your first city. Just that odd case where another civ gets an awesome tundra start and I wish I were Russia, or you get that coastal start and tell yourself that this would be a great game to give Norway a shot.

 

[Sostratus]

In Beyond Earth you could "choose where to land," but in practice this worked out to have a few tile radius to choose where to plop your first city. Not entirely different from simply moving your settler on turn 1, although you did get a nice line of sight revealed before you landed.

To my understanding, the map script generates the terrain, then it decides who to put where based on starting biases.

It would have been interesting if Firaxis had allowed map scripts to take a first pass at starting spots, then randomly assign civs & leaders to players based on what starting spots are available.

This is exactly what happens if you disable starting biases, at least in previous iterations (is this an option in 6 yet?)

Mechanically, I suppose it would not be a massive stretch of software engineering to split the starting location allocation code into "player" and "everyone else." (Since allocating N spots to N civs is not fundamentally different to letting the Human choose 1 and allocating N-1 spots to N-1 civs)
Once it can handle player input over the starting spot, then the player's civ starting biases are immaterial; so you could drop in the civ choice at that point.
It might be just as interesting to allow a player with a given civ a choice between 2-4 starting spots. You could probably even try to give a nice little mix of flat land, hilly, coastal, etc starts to choose from.

Given the mighty Restart Button, though, I'm not sure Firaxis' programmers would feel too motivated to tackle it...

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Yeah, the script will choose a good location for the civ you pick, probably better than you can

Either you are joking or your Civ VI experience has been entirely different from mine. I don't think I've started one game in ten that I didn't immediately restart because the Starting Position given was either marginal or completely inappropriate: tundra starts for Aztecs, jungle start for Scythia, inland starts for England or Norway, and on and on.

So far I don't have enough experience to say Civ VI is any better than Civ V, but in that game I once had to restart a game 18 TIMES to get a start position for Morocco that had both a desert near my capital and a City State or other Civ within 20 tiles to establish a Trade Route with. Since ALL of Morocco's Unique Attributes revolved around desert positions and Trade, this was not merely personal preference on my part, it represents Really Bad Coding on the game designer's part.

But all of this is simply a symptom of the Basic Flaw in the Civ game design for Civ V and VI both: Civilizations are designed to take advantage of their presumed Historical Attributes, which include attributes based on their 'native' terrain and climate: Scythia on the plains with horses, Russia on/near Tundra tiles, etc. Then you 'pick' a Civ to play without seeing or knowing whether the built-in Attributes of that civilization will be in any way appropriate to the terrain/climate that you start on. It is both counter-intuitive and historically inaccurate: Norwegians would never have taken to the sea and become 'vikings' if there was no sea nearby, any more than India would (in the past three Civ games, at least) have an Elephant-based Unique Unit if India the Civ started in South America where (as far as we know so far) there have never been any flipping' elephants or elephanty critters to tame!

I realize this is entirely personal preference, but to me playing a jungle-based Civ with a desert Start, or a tundra-enhancing Civ in the desert, is a Fantasy game, with no real historical basis, just historical titles that are meaningless.

One 'cure' not involving complete recoding of the entire start sequence would be to have an Expanded Starting View of, say, up to a 6 - 10 tile diameter and then allow a 'starting move' on Game Turn 0 to pick a Start Position for your Settler within that expanded section. That would not be perfect, but in most cases it would allow you to move Peter's Russians a little nearer to their Home Turf Tundra or Harold's Norse closer to the coast...

 

[blackbutterfly]

Either you are joking or your Civ VI experience has been entirely different from mine. I don't think I've started one game in ten that I didn't immediately restart because the Starting Position given was either marginal or completely inappropriate: tundra starts for Aztecs, jungle start for Scythia, inland starts for England or Norway, and on and on.

That was prior to the Fall '17 Patch that introduced the start locations bug

Now it's a total mess. Even the November Hotfix doesn't properly solve this problem.

 

[Sostratus]

One 'cure' not involving complete recoding of the entire start sequence would be to have an Expanded Starting View of, say, up to a 6 - 10 tile diameter and then allow a 'starting move' on Game Turn 0 to pick a Start Position for your Settler within that expanded section.

This is essentially the way Beyond Earth opened if you selected "Retrograde Thrusters" as your spaceship option. *

The only issue is, then, should the map scripts still center your starting 'region' on where it would have placed your settler, or should there be an evaluation of these starting zones by regional quality?

I think we've all had some starts where you can see 2-4 great city locations nearby- and some (particularly if you end up on a small peninsula) where the capital is really the only 'good' site.
Because you may inadvertently introduce another "rng primary" where sometimes you can really hone down a great spot, and sometimes you're effectively railroaded into the same city site it would have given you anyways.

*Digression: beyond earth was actually a quite innovative game, and had many great features and mechanics- ultimately done in by a lack of balancing passes and insufficient backstory. In particular relevance to this thread, I think they did a wonderful job finding ways to make marginal tiles more useful with enough tech. If Civ6 introduced methods of boosting deserts/tundra (solar plant? a second wave of resource reveals? allowing farming eventually?), coasts (with and without resources), it would go a long way into how we view and plan our empires- right from the starting site on Turn 1!

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

This is essentially the way Beyond Earth opened if you selected "Retrograde Thrusters" as your spaceship option. *

Thank you , I did not know that. I confess I bought BE but only played it a couple of times, because it was such a terrible successor to SMAC, which I still think is the model for How Science Fiction Civ Should Be Done. The only thing I really liked about BE was the Tech Tree/Web with primary and then subordinate Techs. I really thought that was the way they were going to go to liven up the Tech Tree in Civ VI, instead of giving us the artificial Pablum of a Tree we got. Technologies and Applications of those Technologies would allow such a much more varied 'Tech Progression'. Instead we get technologies like Stirrups, an artificial 'tech' solely for the purpose of getting the player a Knight unit. (Hint: the stirrup was introduced to western Asia AT LEAST 900 years before Knights were introduced in Europe: the connection between the two is dubious, to say the least)

*Digression: beyond earth was actually a quite innovative game, and had many great features and mechanics- ultimately done in by a lack of balancing passes and insufficient backstory. In particular relevance to this thread, I think they did a wonderful job finding ways to make marginal tiles more useful with enough tech. If Civ6 introduced methods of boosting deserts/tundra (solar plant? a second wave of resource reveals? allowing farming eventually?), coasts (with and without resources), it would go a long way into how we view and plan our empires- right from the starting site on Turn 1!

Ah, now you're pushing one of my buttons: the lack of Dynamic Change in the Civ maps and from technological changes.
One: ALL resources of a type are revealed at the same time. No Gold Rushes later, no Strikes of oil, iron, special alloys, etc. What you see all at one time is all you will see to the End of Game. How dull.
Two: None of the ability to Change the Terrain that we actually have: No strip mines removing the entire mountain to get at ores, no filling in of estuaries (at the least, it should be a Unique Attribute for the Netherlands!), no Chunnels, Canals, artificial Lakes, artificial Islands, etc.
Three: No discoveries of entirely new uses for Resources - like Copper becoming necessary for Electrification, Gold for solid-state connectors for Consumer Electronics, no new construction made possible by Advanced Composite Materials, Reinforced Concrete, Wood or Composite Laminates, no Pottery becoming (a few thousand years later) Ceramic Composites (among other things, the basis for modern armor on both people and tanks!)

I will now stop before this turns into a multi-page Rant.