I just played a rather odd map.

[Gus_Smedstad]

I was going to title this thread "look Ma, no city states." Because I was on a large continent with no one but Egypt. I mean no one, not a single city state. The other civs were shoehorned into a couple of near-islands, and there was one (1) city state on the entire map. I carefully looked over the foreign cities when I found them, and none of them were conquered city states.

I really thought the map generator had suffered some sort of complete failure, leaving them out. It takes a surprising amount out of the game, when they're absent.

 

[Jaybe]

Map size and type?

 

[Disgustipated]

Might not be enough viable city starting spots for them. Still very unusual. Even the less ideal map types can find a suitable starting location for city states.

 

[Gus_Smedstad]

This was Standard Size / Continents. Which is pretty much all I ever play, actually. I'm not fond of the oddball map types, and there's a lot less variety in the "not weird" map generators than in Civ 4 or 5.

I'd say there were plenty of viable city sites. The continent I shared with Egypt was quite large, and had all the usual rivers and food resources.

 

[Victoria]

Agreed, I have had a few odball maps including me on a whole continent by myself just with nan modal

 

[Leyrann]

Actually had something like this too, though with six of the twelve civs not spawning. I know mods that alter map generation can cause it, wasn't aware it happened in the base game too. Are you using a map generation mod?

 

[DiffSarit]

Maybe they are all in another continent (separate by ocean).

In my recent game (either Fractal or Shuffle/Standard size), only a few CSs are in the main continents that every civ are located. The rest of them are all gathering in another continent that was joint to the main landmass by a narrow land bridge.

In a Continent map type, I could imagine that it was totally separated by ocean tiles and with some weird luck, every CS is in that continent.

 

[Gus_Smedstad]

No, no map generation mods. I'm playing with Better Trade Screens and Unit Report, but that's it.

This particular map was:

1. Very large continent, Egypt and myself (as Arabia). Many, many suitable sites.
2. One fair-sized continent with Rome and Kongo.
3. One medium island with a city state. Far south, so the southern half was snow (not tundra) and unsuitable for cities.
4. One rather small, strung out island with Russia.

I don't see any way of extracting the map seed from an existing game, and I never bother making note of it when starting a game.

 

[c4c6]

just from a file I save useful snippets from this forum:

"""It is actually very easy to extract the game/map seeds.
1) go to the folder where your game is saved. Documents\My Games\Sid Meier'sCivilization IV\Saves\single
2) copy the saved game you need and paste it into the Saves_Multi folder.
3) create a multi player game using the saved file, and it will show all the information.

PS: in order for the game/map seed to work, you need to adjust all the settings according to the original setup. map size, world age, number of players/citystates, resources etc....however, you can change the diffculty level freely without interrupting the map."""

Probably with this information you can provide all necessary to recreate that map.