When I started my first game on Regent, I selected huge map, 16 civs, pangaea and I was playing as the Russians.
At first I thought "what a brilliant location" - my starting position was on grassland, with a river, hills nearby, incense luxury - paradise in short!
I sent my scout to investigate the continent

lol: ) and find new civs but... It turned out that apart from that nice starting location I was on a small island full of tundra and mountains!
I played on, but was only able to get 5 cities on the island at decent locations. The island was completely surrounded by oceans and I lost a number of galleys trying to cross the oceans.
Every single wonder which I started was finished ahead of me by some AI civs.
At that point I decided to 'retire' in order to see the world map and find out where the other civs are.
It turned out that somewhere there is a huge continent (pangaea) with 14 civs on it and next to it is a small continent with the Romans and then far, far away from it is my island. So at that point I decided to quit that game and started a new one.
Note: the bigger civs on the continent had up to 30 cities by then, so I had no chance...