What I thought was a very bad Tectonics start turned out...

[Bast]

... to be the best game I've ever played on Monarch so far.

So I started a game on Tectonics map (70% water) as Asoka. First turn I could see some tundra hills and thought oh no it's a polar start. After my warrior started wandering I found that I had so little land it would only fit a few cities and my neighbour Suleiman started about 2 cities lengths away from me. At that point I thought forget it, he's probably attached to a land mass and I'm blocked off. I played on and found that he didn't build any cities because he only had space for one city - his capital!! So I ended up with 4 cities including the capital and his city on our tiny polar land mass. I thought, forget it, there would be about 5 other civs and they would have so much land to settle and advance. One turn I checked in F9 and saw that I was No. 1 in land area. I thought okay something's going on. So I played on and took Suleiman out - he built Parthenon and Shwedagon Paya - nice. I switched to Free Religion and went out and met the world and it turned out 3 civs were on an island a little bigger than ours and 2 other civs on an island about the same size. There were two other islands in the world slightly smaller than those but you can still build cities and I colonized both except Gilgamesh founded one city on one of them. Because I got to Liberalism first and got Astronomy before anyone I was able to do this. Now I'm almost double the score of my closest rival. The first time ever on a Monarch game from such a pathetic start.

Moral of the story, don't give up on games too easily.

 

[Bast]

See how bad the start is:

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Tectonics tends to give crappy starts but that also happens for many of the AIs. AIs are terrible at adapting to bad land, so often tectonics feels easier.

 

[Stolen Rutters]

Nice. Tectonics gave me the most unusual but interesting game I played this year as well. The metals were near mountains and no food. The food was in the valleys but no metals. I was near neither, and had to fight my way to victory. Hard choices had to be made. Three AI had much better positions than I did and expanded into behemoth empire size. The rest were like me, fighting for scraps. Most of my wars were fought from a disadvantage. If it were multiplayer I would have been sunk for sure. Quite an interesting game in the end.

 

[Yxklyx]

Those 70% water ("earthlike") Tectonics maps look more like 80% or 90% water.

 

[Shackel]

You're lucky. The AI would usually give YOU the start Suli. had, while having the others have an awesome start.

 

[omnimutant]

Some of my best games have been ones that severely limit land mass, so it's totally understandable. I don't think the AI can handle those situations as well as humans TBH.
Good stuff.

 

[Zeiter]

Tectonics is just about the most unpredictable map type out there. I like that. I hate playing on hemisphere maps, where you can guess the overall layout more or less from the beginning. B&S has given me some fun maps. But tectonics is where it's at. Sometimes I'll find I have to settle complete trash cities just in order to grab some desert hill gold or plains copper in the middle of a desert or iron stuck in the middle of a barren mountain range fustercluck...which leads to some interesting choices..."Hmmm, is that copper really worth it? Oh, yeah, it turns out I have 4 axemen showing up on my borders this turn...alrighty then!"

Tectonics can be quite unbalanced with the starting positions too. In one recent game I started with Ho-Chi-Minh of Vietnam (PRO/PHI), and was looking forward to some nice GP farms, and I find that my land is a barren wasteland of plains and desert. But...I did have elephants! And I see that Zara, right next door, has a luscious tropical paradise of grassland rivers, all pre-cleared of jungle for me. Oh, how sweet he was to do that for me! Anyways, for me, tectonics definitely keeps me on my toes. Every game turns out different.

Edit: And something I like about tectonics maps (and I've seen this in perfectworld maps too), is that for once you have distinguishable geographical regions that make the game more interesting/immersive. Instead of the map having a neat, but boring balance of plains, grassland, desert, mountains, etc., you've got huge clusters/ranges of mountains, huge hilly plains/desert anatolia-looking regions, jungle regions, scandanavia regions near the poles where there is an unexpected intrusion of warmer terrain types up into severe lattitudes...I like those sorts of things.

But this...

Those 70% water ("earthlike") Tectonics maps look more like 80% or 90% water.

...is totally correct. Be aware of that. For this reason, I always play 60% earthlike with tectonics. (And in that case, it usually ends up being more like 50%). With 60% water, I've gotten things as varied as 3 variable-size continents strung together within galley range, or 1 big pangea with a medium size australia type of island completely separated, or just a bunch of snaky continents with inland seas that can be joined to the ocean by cities and forts...there's no telling.