Armory, I've been playing on a Tiny map and in both games, it's tiny islands all over the place with coasts touching... for both these games, I could reach every single island with a galley (even pre-Open Borders), although sometimes you have to go a l-o-n-g way around some strips of ocean. Spirit, this is with 1.6, so the problem persists, at least for Tiny maps. I agree, it would not only look better, but make for more strategy/less swiss cheese, if it wasn't wall-to-wall splattered with islands.
Who's tried larger Arch maps... is there in fact a lot of isolation? That would really change things.
dalamb, yes I've seen a 5-city island before... wouldn't you know it, the AIs always seem to have much better luck with their start positions. (I'm playing Prince, if it matters.) But still, even the "big" masses are strung-out noodles rarely more than 3 wide at any one place.
Actually, that's one of the things that's made this so interesting for me - the swiss cheese of the map. I'm the type who likes to keep the capacity for war (barracks, drydocks), but not build a huge army until attacked or ready (=endgame, laugh). So on my first Arch game when an AI declared war, boom, within a few turns many of my resources were gone due to air raids (land) and both air and sea raids (water). I ultimately won in style because the AI is so lame on attacking (remember, these are almost all sea-borne attacks, so the AI is particularly lame; I just airdropped Mech Inf into the few cities I saw him going for), but it took dozens of turns to first build up a navy, then take out his cities in my midst (which were air attacking all my land improvements... all sea resources were long gone), get a "safe" back yard, then slowly swing that pendulum back my way.
I can understand playing different maps, but I played "regular" (continent) style forever and wanted to try something new. Next I'll try pangea.
You're right on target about food problems leading to windmills and cottages. Also, since there's less actual land, there are more city-placement compromises in terms of, you have to leave a crab behind to get a copper, or "arg, why's there sea tile right in the middle of all these beautiful resources?" Often this leads to little "clean up" cities once you get Communism to make the city maintenance almost a non-issue (then switch to something else after you're in high gear across the board).
In my games, there are usually about as many of the production resources (iron, copper, horses, uranium, etc.) as there are players, maybe a little more even, which means all players usually have many, if not most of the production resources, in my experience (Tiny, 3 players) - EXCEPT for stone and marble. Even on regular/continent maps, I've been seeing usually only 1 or 2 stone and marble. Are random maps always like this for stone and marble? What a PITA, lol. Other land-based health/happy resources are fairly few in number, which also limits folks, although if you cover a fair amount of ground and throw in a couple through trading, it's adequate.
Oh right, then there's the Culture issue. Culture does NOT cross water very well. I learned this the hard way when my second(!) city was only 3 tiles away from an Iron, but the city was on an isolated one-tile island (to reach Fish and Crabs on the other side). Lo and behold, an AI plants a city on the island with the Iron, TWO tiles away from my second city. (That's right, cities can be two tiles away if on separate land masses/islands.) On a regular/land map, a resource 3 tiles away from your second city in the game is usually yours for life unless the AI gets real lucky or dumb (in which case you out-culture him). Not on this map!!
Also, for anybody playing an Arch map (or any map, really), don't forget that a land resource has to be physically connected to your city, for your civ to "have" the resource. Your city can still use the resource tile as usual, but your civ doesn't get the resource unless connected to a city by road/railroad. So you can use weird little cities to block others from resources by a culture boundary overlap onto another island, but your civ won't get that resource if they're on separate land masses (=islands on an Arch map).
Zou, I hadn't thought about leaders; I'd been doing randoms. I'll have to consider it for one more Arch before I try Pangea.
the only oil was off the coast of my main island and one each on a few islands I settled and the big island that the other two civs were on had no oil! 
