Sully map taking a solid lead.
Why on earth do people want to see this?
My two cents and random thoughts:
It can be fun and educational to play rich starts. Maps like the Suleiman one have so many resources that it can be hard for less experienced players - like myself - to figure out what matters most. I remember playing a game with Hatchet that had an extremely rich start, but I was getting frustrated because I didn't know how to optimize everything. (Also, there were so many flood plains that my capital grew into unhealthiness at size 3). The Suleiman map is so rich that it would be tough for some players to decide what's most important. Chopping? Seafood? Ivory? Flood plain cottages? Gold? What should the tech order be? The veterans can probably answer these questions easily, but others might have a hard time.
Think of it this way: AbsoluteZero used to play relatively easy starts all the time, and many players would attribute their knowledge of the game to him. I've read numerous posts that go something like this: "I used to be a Warlord/Noble/Prince player, then I started watching AZ's videos and jumped up to Immortal." The very first Civ 4 Let's Play I ever watched was AZ's triple gold Pericles game. I learned a lot from it, even though it was a great start.
Besides, there's no way to know how hard a map is until it's been played. That's one of the great things about this game - no map is won on Turn 0. Consider the infamous Wang Kon "Prepare to DIE" game. The start is actually pretty nice (river, corn, and ivory). It's the AI setup and map shape that makes the map hard. Granted, the start isn't as good as the Suleiman start, but the point still stands. If we judge the difficulty of maps based on the starting screen alone, we might conclude that the Wang map is actually pretty easy.
Most of the games Lain has played on his channel are of average-to-hard difficulty IMO, and recently he's played several very hard maps (Mansa, Pacal, Sury, and Pericles, to name a few). There's nothing wrong with easy starts every now and then. Sure, it would get boring to see easy maps over and over again, but it would also get boring (for me at least) to see "extremely hard, only the best can beat it" maps repeatedly.
Variety is essential. I personally voted for the Lincoln map for this reason. We've never seen any random personality games on the channel. Suleiman would be a good choice too - not sure if we've ever seen No Tech Trading (and if we have, it's only been once or twice). And we certainly don't see very many rich starts.
. Any way to change that now?
. Thankfully you can make a regular save after jumping through all those hoops, and assuming you chose the same leader/difficulty the game will run mostly fine. The turn count for a Time victory will be stuck on whatever speed the map was originally generated on (you can actually see that if you look at the Sally playthrough), but that shouldn't matter. It certainly didn't on the Sally map. There also could be other issues if you chose a different leader or difficulty level, but key word, "if".
