stwils said:
What do you mean by the colors placed last?
Also what you are saying is that the traits of the civ you choose influences the techs you get at the beginning.
Please say more about these two thoughts.
stwils
I do not recall the details of the full order that starting locations are chosen but I do know that the game places each country 1 at a time when the world is being built. In Civ 1, white is the last country to be placed. The game calculates how good a starting location you have based on things like number of neighbors, distance to neighbors, make up of the land near the starting location (forest, tundra, grasslands, etc) and such. The worse it thinks your starting location is, the more help it gives you at the start.
The game sees having a lot of neighbors as a bad thing (early attack, etc) and it evaluates the starting spot of each nation at the time it is placed. Therefore, the first country placed will never have neighbors and thus will only get bonus techs, settler, etc if it is starting in a "bad location" (few grasslands, etc). The later in the order of 7 that a nation is placed, the more likely it is to have several neighbors and the more likely it is to get bonuses.
As for the traits info, see the thread on "In Civ1 (windows & Dos) are there any differences in the civs' characteristics?" I will try to explain briefly here but there is more info in that thread as well.
Each civ has 3 traits that help it make decisions in the game:
1 - an agressive rating (friendly, normal, aggressive) - The more aggressive a civ is, the more likely they are to declare war, etc.
2 - A development rating (perfectionist, normal, expansionist) - Perfectionist nations are more into building a few large cities with lots of infrastructure, expansionist are more likely to have lots of small cities with fewer improvements.
3 - A militaristic rating (civilized, normal, militaristic) - Militaristic civs will build more units/larger armies. Civilized civs will concentrate more on libraries, etc.
So, based on what traits you have, you have a greater percentage of getting certain techs as gifts if the game assumes you have a bad starting position. Again, I don't have the stats in front of me or the tech chart but civilized civs are more likely to get things like alphabet or pottery while militaristic civs are more likely to get things like the wheel or bronze working, etc.