Starting Biases

[Gidoza]

I'm just wondering how much Starting Biases are capable of being manipulated and what the limits are to setting them up. It seems to me there could be room for improvement in this regard, but I have no idea what can and can't be done. Further to that is the question of how appropriate some of the busses are for each Civ. Also, how specific can we get with Starting Biases?


Some simple examples are these.

Carthage - Should obviously start on coast, preferably with at least 2 coastal tiles. (She sometimes is in-land, which should never happen.)

Songhai - Needs rivers and Horses, and you'd think the river would be more than two tiles long.

Huns - Very unique in that to make Ekis useful, you need to have non-desert, non-tundra, non-hills, non-rivers, non-lakes, although some coast seems OK. Forests and Jungles can be chopped but seem a non-ideal starting location for him as well.


And so on. What are the limits?

 

[azum4roll]

A civ can have a coastal bias, a river bias, one or more start region priority, and one or more region to be avoided. Current AssignStartingPlots.lua only handles them in sequence, so a civ can only have one of the four. Technically it's possible to change the code to handle 2-4 different types of biases, but it could result in more randomness in distance between civs, and some civs might not find the specific starting position that they want.

It's however not possible (without major modifications) to force civs to start with 2+ coast tiles or a river that's 2+ tiles long. Or near horses.

 

[andersw]

The starting bias seems rather loose, like you said, it is very possible to get the infamous inland sea coastal start as well as the very short river and Iroqois with only a few forest tiles.
I assume good map scripts can make a difference with how long rivers are, prevention of crap seas etc.

 

[azum4roll]

It's possible to avoid inland sea coastal starts by modifying MapmakerUtilities.AdjacentToSaltWater to check whether the water tile is in the largest water area.

 

[JamesNinelives]

(She sometimes is in-land, which should never happen.)

Starting bias doesn't always give you what you want, so unfortunately this is going to be true for all civs. It's a priority system if I understand correctly, with an element of randomness as to who gets to choose first, but I forget the details beyond that.

Technically it's possible to change the code to handle 2-4 different types of biases, but it could result in more randomness in distance between civs, and some civs might not find the specific starting position that they want.

I use the Really Advanced Setup to give myself two starting biases and it seems to work pretty well. I do get starts that are pretty close to other civs sometimes and starts that don't match either descriptor, but noticeably more often than it happens with the default starting biases.

 

[CrazyG]

Just FYI guys, only one start bias actually takes effect, and they have a priority list. Also the game generates the 8 (or however many) starting positions first, then it assigns them to players based on priorities. So you might have 4 civs with a coastal bias, but the game only generated 3 coastal starts. Someone is just out of luck. Another one is that river goes before terrain. This means that if one start is a long river with floodplains, Songhai probably takes it before Arabia does.

Another example: avoid terrain is the lowest priority. This means that Egypt with his avoid forest bias isn't that likely to avoid forest. He usually just gets whatever start position is left after the civs with higher priorities get theirs. If there was say 4 civs with a river bias, 1 civ with a coastal bias, and 2 civs with desert bias, Egypt would just get the remaining location, which with those parameters, actually has pretty a decent chance of being forest or jungle.

 

[JamesNinelives]

only one start bias actually takes effect

Using Really Advanced Setup to change your default start bias to 2 terrain types (or to avoid 2 terrain types) does seem to work though, at least as far as I can tell .

 

[azum4roll]

Using Really Advanced Setup to change your default start bias to 2 terrain types (or to avoid 2 terrain types) does seem to work though, at least as far as I can tell .

It shouldn't. RAS doesn't modify AssignStartingPlots.lua; all it does is override the selected bias over the original ones, so priority still applies.

 

[JamesNinelives]

It shouldn't. RAS doesn't modify AssignStartingPlots.lua; all it does is override the selected bias over the original ones, so priority still applies.

Guess I just got lucky then!